It's Saturday morning in Hilo, and though I'm 2,300 miles from San Francisco, the routine feels awfully familiar. I set my coffee in the car's cup holder and drive downtown to search for a parking place before making my way into the barely passable labyrinth of elbows and shopping baskets at the farmers' market. But if the atmosphere is not very different from that of the Ferry Building, much of the produce is. Alongside the field greens and garlic are five-pound bags of macadamia nuts, spine-covered lychees, knobs of turmeric, and pale pink twists of baby ginger.

As a cook, I find farmers' markets far from home to be equal parts frustration and inspiration—row after row of intriguing ingredients and no kitchen to prepare them in. But on this visit, I fill my bag with shiso leaves, galangal, and wine-dark Waimea strawberries, because tonight, in spite of the distance between me and my stove, I'm cooking my dinner.

I'm staying just up the coast at the Palms Cliff House Inn, a luxurious eight-bedroom spread with a great big kitchen, which once a month or so hosts a weekend-long immersion into the agricultural renaissance quietly taking hold here on the eastern shore of Hawaii's Big Island.

While sun-loving mainlanders flock to the splashy resorts lining the west side of the island, they tend to bypass the Hilo side. It's lush and quiet, what locals like to call the "real" Hawaii, and oh yes, at 128 inches per year, it gets more rain than any other spot in the country. Those warm tropical showers, which come often but never seem to last very long, are what have attracted the more than 100 growers who crowd into the Hilo market every Saturday morning. They, in turn, are making this a destination for in-the-know travelers who want to experience the island the way the folks who live there do rather than hide out under a beach umbrella and stare at the horizon.

The food scene here wasn't always so lively. Until the mid-1980s, this part of the island was dominated by the sugar cane industry. But when government price guarantees ended, the cane producers pulled out, leaving behind thousands of acres of farmland. That opened the door for independent growers like Michael Crowell and Lesley Hill to move in and transform this coast, acre by acre, from a one-crop wonder back to its historic agricultural roots.

When a group of us from the inn arrive at their farm for a morning tour, Crowell greets us with one hand outstretched and the other clasping a machete. Then he turns and begins to hack at a four-foot-long piece of peach palm like a cartoon chef wielding a cleaver. A minute later we're eating the fresh hearts of the plant. Smooth and crisp, with a delicate artichoke-like flavor, palm hearts are one of Crowell and Hill's most successful products, but hardly the only one. As we walk through the fields, we stop every few feet to sample something new. Hill reaches up into one of the trees and pulls off a spray of cloves. A minute later she breaks open a nutmeg and hands me the spice still wrapped in its scarlet filigree of mace. Then she harvests a bough of bay leaves before we move down to where the rambutan grows. The fat, red fruits covered with what resembles hair have flesh that looks and tastes like a plump peeled grape.

Over the course of the weekend, we also visit a vanilla plantation, a goat cheese producer, and a man who's trying to revive the region's coffee industry. In the afternoons, there's time to hike from the inn through a rain forest lush with wild orchids and bamboo groves to Akaka Falls, where the water drops 420 feet down an emerald-colored gorge. And later, to sink into the inn's double Jacuzzi overlooking the bay.

Cooking classes begin at four. Guests gather in the inn's spacious kitchen, where the more energetic chop won bok (that's napa cabbage to you) and fry shrimp, while others simply snack on salted mac nuts and freshly made poke while keeping an eye out for the whales that often swim into the bay. Two hours later, an island-grown feast is ready and everyone sits down to dinner.

Classes, which focus on Pacific Rim dishes, are led by local cooks, including ex-Berkeleyite Brian Nussbaum. Burned out from his role as chief litigator for PG&E during the energy crisis, Nussbaum relocated his family to the Big Island (they left on the first flight out of Oakland Airport after 9/11) and began producing a line of barbecue sauces. Along with a binder full of recipes, he offers a crash course on local customs and dialect—"ono grinds" translates to good food, and no one appreciates it if you "talk stink" about your neighbor—as well as the fine points of deep-frying.

In the morning, students get a break from kitchen duty while innkeepers Michele and John Gamble prepare breakfast and serve it on the inn's sweeping lanai, just a few yards away from a cliff that drops 100 feet to Pohakumanu Bay. Even here, the culinary tour continues, but this time it comes to us: A slice of quiche is stuffed with Hawaiian purple sweet potatoes and asparagus and peppers from up on the volcano's slope, a crepe is fashioned out of poi, and pancakes are loaded with apple bananas, mangoes, and macadamia nuts from the inn's garden and orchard. With exotic ingredients folded into familiar dishes, the meal, like the entire weekend, bears the unmistakable flavor of Hawaii.

(808) 963-6076, www.palmscliffhouse.com. Culinary weekends are $975 per person or $1,350 per couple, including three nights' accommodation and meals, cooking classes, and tours.