Gumbo

I needed to use some problematic okra from the garden--some was old and pretty tough, and some was young and tender, and there wasn't very much of either. I started out with Paula Deen's gumbo recipe, and made a few modifications, as usual. I used chicken thighs instead of breasts. I used butter instead of margarine and cut down on the fat amounts a bit. Also, I didn't have 5 bouillon cubes (!) so I used two chicken ones.

I sliced the elderly okra and threw it in when the recipe suggested. Then I steamed the baby okra separately and garnished each bowl with a few of those. It was so pretty, and gave the okra its due.

Vegetarian Southern Food Again

Mark returned for a short visit, this time with his awesome new wife, and I made a vegetarian Southern meal the last night they were here. It was semi-successful.

The grits were fine, nothing fancy -- you can see them soaking on the right side of the picture. Just soaked, simmered for a few hours, and finished with half and half.

I made black eyed peas -- I browned onions and garlic and flour carefully but quite a bit, then added some sherry and a lot of vegetable stock and some fresh thyme and cooked it all down for an hour and a half. It was a nutty brown, very rich and good.

I quickly sauteed garden collards with some red pepper flakes, finishing them with vinegar.

Florida okra and tomatoes have started appearing in stores, so I made stewed tomatoes and okra. Very simple: just sweated half a Vidalia onion in some butter, then added the okra (stems cut off) and a few chopped tomatoes (seeds and some skin removed) and cooked it all down for 15 minutes, covered.

And I made strawberry rhubarb cobbler.

Okra and Greek-Style Cod

Can you believe that we're now harvesting okra? This is our second batch. I steamed them following your method and they are wonderful.

I also cooked Greek-style cod last night. Of course you can use any flaky white fish in this recipe (I don't think firm types like tuna and swordfish would be quite right).

Thai Beef Rolls with Sweet Chile Sauce

Lawson made these grilled, Thai basil-wrapped meatballs last week. The chile sauce was very sweet -- tasted just like the Maggi sweet chile sauce I love to put on burgers, except with a fresher lime flavor. And the meatballs were perfect. He used more mint than the recipe calls for, and added some Thai basil to the meat mixture. I highly recommend the recipe.

We tried using some lemongrass stalks as skewers for a few of the meatballs, but there was no discernible flavor difference.

I made jasmine rice, and I invented a simple new okra recipe to deal with some slightly tougher pods: sauteed cumin, garlic, and a dried red chile, followed by sliced okra and enough water to keep things from sticking -- around 1/8 cup. I covered the whole thing and cooked it for 15-20 minutes. Touch of salt. Delicious.

On Succotash and Microwaving Sweet Corn

So, as I mentioned in a comment below, we recently heard from Lawson's dad that microwaving fresh corn is way better than boiling it. I looked up several recipes, did some experiments, and found that he is absolutely correct. I'm a convert.

All the prep I did was to cut off the messy tip of the husks with scissors. I didn't pull the silk out -- I just cut off the whole silk-and-husk part that was hanging off the end. I pulled off a few banged-up outer leaves from some ears, but not all. Mostly this was so the corn would fit in our microwave.

Then I microwaved the corn for 4 to 5 minutes, rotating the ears once halfway through. If I put more than two or three ears in at a time, I would increase the cooking time by a few minutes.

Use gloves to rotate and remove the ears -- that corn gets hot, and little pockets of steam in the husks can burn the heck out of your hand.

Let the corn sit for 10-15 minutes so it can steam and cool off, then pull off the husks and silk. The best part: shucking cooked ears is way easier than shucking them raw. And the corn flavor is intense.

I didn't even put butter or salt on this corn, it was so good. It was from somewhere in the Upstate; Lawson's dad brought back 8 ears for us, and I've been wishing for more ever since.

Mostly we ate it plain, but one night I made succotash with all fresh ingredients. It was among the freshest, purest, most summery foods I've ever cooked.


I didn't like any of the recipes I read, many of which called for bacon, which I thought would be wrong here. Fresh lima beans or butter beans might have been good, but I liked the sweetness of the dish without them. So here's my recipe:

Succotash

1-2 tablespoons butter
1 small onion, diced
2 cups fresh tender okra, sliced crosswise into 1" pieces
2 or more cups fresh tomatoes, seeded and roughly chopped
2 ears fresh sweet corn, microwaved and set aside to cool
salt

Saute the onion in butter over medium until soft, not brown. Saute okra lightly. Add tomatoes and let cook for 5 to 10 minutes, until thickened slightly -- you want to keep the tomatoes tasting fresh, not sauce-like. At the last moment, shuck the cooked corn, cut the kernels off, and stir them in. Add salt to taste.

No herbs, no pepper, no nothing -- this is all about the light, sweet flavors of the garden vegetables. It blew me away.

We ate it with buttermilk biscuits (made with Adluh self-rising flour and local buttermilk) and barbecued chicken (marinated in soy sauce with star anise and five-spice powder, then lovingly grilled over a hickory fire by Lawson.

First Okra of the Year

And so it begins again.

I picked up some local crowder peas at the Rosewood Market and cooked them very simply with bacon, salt, and the first two okra pods of the season. And I understood this time what's so special about crowder peas. Lawson describes it as a metallic flavor, and yes, there's a brassy freshness even after 25 minutes of cooking. They taste sort of like fresh peas and sort of like dried beans. Very exciting. We ate them with cold smoked chicken and a simple green salad.

I am impatient for more garden okra. I almost became unprofessional yesterday while interviewing a lady who represents a certain organization that promotes local food when she told me she doesn't like okra. What? She's only lived here a year, though. I guess it took me a few more years than that to come around. She was very neat otherwise. But okra. OKRA.

North by North Africa by West Africa

I bought some Canadian haddock and made your North African Fish Fillets for dinner. I served them with couscous and steamed okra. It was great -- one of those dishes I can't quite imagine the taste of from reading the recipe but that makes perfect sense once it's prepared. The haddock was quite good, and good wild fish is always cause for celebration in Columbia.

For the sauce I used a bunch of garden tomatoes that desperately had to be cooked today -- homegrown tomatoes don't last long off the vine before before breaking out all over with mold or spontaneously liquefying. One minute the tomato is fine; the next it has split down one side and urinated on the counter. I cleaned the heck out of the kitchen today and scrubbed at more stains from little yellow puddles of tomato goo than I care to recount.

I also used some garden chiles instead of a jalapeno: one cowhorn and one dedo de moça. So here's a picture of tomatoes, chiles, and day lilies.

Gumbo

Mark arrived for a visit last night, and I made gumbo. Seriously, a food that contains sausage, shellfish, and okra -- could there be anything holier? The recipe was a hybrid of several Prudhomme recipes -- spice mixture from one, okra instructions from another, andouille amounts from a third. I made the stock from several batches of shrimp shells saved up in the freezer and toasted in a dry hot pan before being simmered for about an hour. I added garden tomatoes as well. And we happened to have some leftover smoked chicken, which rounded everything out.

It was the kind of chopping- and stirring-intensive meal perfect for three people standing around in the kitchen drinking too much. We moved from gin and tonics to Yuengling to pinot noir to scotch, and this morning we all feel it more than a little. Fortunately there is gumbo for breakfast.

Satay Triple Threat and Indian Okra II

I like when one meal feeds another -- when something left over can be used again in a new way. There are lots of brilliant examples of doubled meals: spaghetti sandwiches, your post-Thanksgiving turkey chowder, rice pudding.

It wasn't quite so magical as those examples, but the peanut dipping sauce I made Saturday to go with Lawson's shrimp-vegetable kebabs and stir-fried noodles became the dressing for Sunday's salad: another iteration of the Thai watermelon salad. This time the salad had hard-boiled egg, raw red pepper, watermelon, arugula, and Thai basil. I served it with Indian curried okra.

We still have some peanut sauce left. I don't know what's next for it -- a topping for chocolate ice cream? In a burrito with lettuce, black beans, tomatoes, chiles, and pumpkin seeds?

Anyway, yesterday I was happier with the okra. Here's my modified version of Madhur Jaffrey's Sweet and Sour Okra.

Indian Curried Okra

Mash in a mortar and pestle to form a paste:
-5 cloves garlic
-1-2 small dried red chiles
-1 teaspoon coriander seeds
-1 teaspoon salt
-1 tablespoon water, if needed

(Jaffrey had me pureeing garlic and chiles and 4 T water in a blender, but getting such a small amount of liquid out of my blender was awful. Plus, then the blender smelled like garlic and red chiles. With cleaning and scraping factored in, the mortar and pestle took less time.)

Stir in:
-1/2 teaspoon turmeric

Heat over medium in large skillet with lid:
-3 tablespoons oil

When hot, add:
-2 teaspoons cumin seeds

When they seeds begin to sputter and fry, turn down heat, add the paste, and stir, letting it fry but not burn for about a minute.

Add:
-1 pound okra, rinsed, tops chopped off and pods sliced into 3/4" pieces
-1-2 tablespoons lemon juice
-1 teaspoon sugar
-a few tablespoons of water

Cover and simmer for 10 minutes or until okra is tender. Add more salt and lemon juice if necessary.

Okra Indian-Style

We ate a lot of meat over the weekend: Genoa salami on pizza Friday, burgers and salmon Saturday, bacon for breakfast Sunday. By Sunday night I was ready for a meatless dinner, and I wanted good Indian food after an overly rich and generally disappointing Indian restaurant experience the week before. So I made:

• Lentils with spinach and onions -- no particular recipe, just lentils boiled and then sauteed in with onions, garlic, spinach, and a bay leaf
• Cubes of sweet potato roasted with salt and olive oil -- one of the world's best foods
• Madhur Jaffrey's sweet and sour okra -- turmeric, cumin, coriander, garlic, dried red chiles, lemon juice, and okra

The Jaffrey recipe was a bit cumin-heavy but otherwise glorious. I predict that some variation of it will become one of my favorite okra recipes. I'll tweak it a bit and post it soon.

Succotash Pizza and a New Knife

It had to be done, right? Right?

I love okra. I love pizza. We have many fresh tomatoes. Tomatoes, okra, and corn go together brilliantly. It was natural that I would want to put all these things together. But I couldn't shake the memory of the pizzas served from carts on the street in London: soggy and unbrowned, cluttered with greasy cheese and all the wrong vegetables. One of those pizzas had corn on it. It seemed to have been dumped right out of the can onto the pizza.

To avoid the yucky canned corn effect, I roasted loose kernels of frozen corn ahead of time. After 10 minutes at 425 degrees, they were nutty and gently browned, and much more appealing. I roasted the okra a bit, too, but I needn't have. Fresh tomatoes, a little mozzarella, one sliced poblano chile, and grated Asiago and Parmesan pulled all the flavors together quite well.

I also made a classic pizza Margherita to balance things out.

Our friend Mark is visiting from Kyoto and gave us this amazing knife, shown here with the poblano:

It's made by a company called Aritsugu, which I'd never heard of but have enjoyed reading about. Lawson's and my names are carved in the blade (on the other side -- this side says Aritsugu). It's beautiful.

Pork Feast

My brother, his girlfriend, and my parents are all visiting us here in Columbia. For the first big meal, Lawson smoked a pork butt and some pork ribs. He went to work; I took the day off, and we all monitored the smoker all day. With the pork we served sliced garden tomatoes, steamed okra, white corn grits, and Lawson's homemade mustard-based barbecue sauce.

We ate outside. It was hot, and we were supplied with the other usual South Carolina outdoor hazards: here is Russell picking a fruit fly out of his wine.

Steamed Okra

You already know, Mom, how much I love okra. I eat it several times a week throughout the summer and fall; when Lawson's plants really start producing, we sometimes eat it every day. It has frankly glorious effects on one's digestion. I love the plants, which have delicate yellow hibiscus-like flowers and grow to 10 feet tall by the end of the season, so tall I have to bend them down to pick the okra at the top.

It wasn't always like this. Your encounter with a stringy, boogery bowl of boiled okra in your early 20s was passed on like a family ghost story: I moved to the South absolutely convinced that okra was a slimy horror, barely a vegetable -- just another Southern embarrassment. But I tried it, and then tried it again, and though it took some getting used to, it is now among my favorite foods.

I've only once bought okra from the store, and I was a little disappointed, but I think I am spoiled by the garden. Choose small pods, no more than 4 inches long and preferably half that length. Size is not good with okra; if you don't pick pods in time, they'll grow to 16 inches long and become hard as tree trunks, totally inedible. The pods must be absolutely fresh, with no woodiness or drying – tough pods can be used in gumbos or other stews, where they’ll have more time to soften.

Minimal handling keeps the pods from becoming gooey. Don’t cut the stems off. I don’t even wash whole okra before cooking them, as water also contributes to sliminess. I just brush them off a little.

Most people consider fried okra the most approachable preparation, and it's true that it's a good introduction to the flavor. Last night we broiled okra after tossing it with salt and olive oil. We intended to grill it, but the grill ran out of gas, and broiling worked perfectly. But the absolute best way to eat okra is steamed. I'm not usually a steamed vegetable fan -- steamed broccoli makes me particularly sad -- but steamed okra is different. Steaming brings out okra flavors that no other cooking method uncovers. It's complex and nutty and sweet and oystery and asparaguslike and perfectly tender.

Steamed Okra

Boil water in a pot with a fitted steamer. If some pods are significantly bigger than others, put the bigger pods in a few minutes earlier. Steam the pods for anywhere from 3 to 8 minutes, checking every few minutes. Remove the pot from the heat when the pods are bright dewy green and easily pierced with a fork. Remove immediately to a dry bowl – don’t let the water from the bottom of the pot touch the pods – and sprinkle liberally with salt. Eat with fingers.

Thai Stir-Fried Okra, Eggplant, and Tomatoes

Lawson is much better with the wok than I am, so he usually does the stir-frying around here. He's fun to watch. As you can see here, he moves at superhero speed.

He roasted the eggplant first to soften it -- without precooking, it seems to stay tough and soak up too much oil. He then stir-fried onions, okra, the roasted eggplant, and tomato in some chile-garlic-basil paste he made last year. A little fish sauce, chicken broth, and fresh Thai basil finished it. We served it over plain white rice.

The chile-garlic-basil paste is based on this amazing product we found at the local Asian market a few years ago: Por Kwan brand sweet chile basil paste. It consists of basil leaves, garlic, fresh chiles, salt, and oil. The Por Kwan is almost as good as Lawson's garden-sourced reproduction.