New Year's Dinner in Hawai'i

In our family it is traditional to have pork (preferably hog jowls, but we haven't found that in stores in years), greens (preferably collard) and black-eyed peas for New Year's Dinner for luck in the new year.  The greens represent making money and the peas coins.  We couldn't find some of the ingredients so we made a twist on the recipe this year.  V cooked pork laulau.  It has pieces of pork, wrapped in taro leaves (for the greens), in turn this is wrapped in Ti leaves for cooking.  Below you can see the laulau placed on foil with holes in it for steaming from the pot of water below.  Also, we could not find any black-eyed peas so we used black beans as a substitute, which can be seen cooking in the pot at the rear. 

 The ti plant (ki in Hawaiian) was spread across the Pacific and brought to Hawai'i by the Polynesians.  It is used for lots of items in traditional Hawaiian culture and planted next to a house today for good luck.  The people that rented our house before us, that I met briefly, were Native Hawaiian and left a ti plant for us in a pot.  I planted it in front of the house below.