Spices for Life

Home cooks can please and even amaze family and friends with gourmet meals—without spending hours over the stove, and without an abundance of saturated fats, salts, sugars, refined carbohydrates and processed foods loaded with preservatives and additives. All they need are Ka‘iulani Cowell’s simple recipes and her popular line of Ka‘iulani Spices to add “Flavor Without the Labor!” The 60-plus recipes in Cowell’s cookbook, Spices for Life: Delicious, Quick and Easy Recipes Made with Organic Ka‘iulani Spices, are uncomplicated, healthy and tasty, because Cowell believes that making good food from fresh ingredients shouldn’t be harder than buying pre-packaged salt-, sugar- and fat-laden products.

In 2004, Cowell founded Ka‘iulani Spices to encourage more people to cook at home, including friends who often complained, “I don’t have time to cook” or “I never know which spices to use!” In a tiny workshop in her backyard, she began studying the numerous health advantages of spices and blended them with fresh herbs, salts and aromatics in her own original recipes. She soon found herself with a new career as a purveyor of spice blends designed to promote good health and create what she calls “flavor without the labor.” From these modest beginnings, her growing line of organic rubs and seasoning mixtures developed signature flavors for chefs, caterers and home cooks throughout Hawai‘i. Her cookbook, Spices for Life, is the result of a decade of fine-tuning her recipes and sharing them at in-store demonstrations and cooking classes.

A trained culinarian originally from Pasay City near Manila, Cowell learned to appreciate the best and freshest food products from her elders, shopping with her mother at local farmers markets. She continued her education at the famed Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York and further developed her cooking skills as a chef at the Hilton Guam Resort and the Stanford Court Hotel in San Francisco. Her culinary philosophy centers on her belief that using fresh, local produce and spices contributes to a healthy lifestyle, and that eating well needn’t be difficult or complicated. Cowell offers frequent tasting demonstrations and cooking classes all over O‘ahu to teach people just how easy good home-cooking can be.

Spiral-bound, semi-flexible hardcover; 168 pp.
Author: Kai‘ulani Cowell
Release Date: October 2017

Ka‘iulani Spices website