Beautiful okra

These are some of the lovely okra we bought at the West Side Market last week. I had been certain that we wouldn't be able to get okra here so early in the season, especially because it seems sure to be more popular in Maryland than in Ohio -- and more popular in Louisiana, say, than Maryland. (Probably more popular in Ohio than in northern Minnesota, though.) So when I saw the basket of fuzzy green pods at this grocer's stall, I squealed in a manner unbecoming to a serious adult person.

"One and a half pounds of the okra, please," I said to the grocer.

"I'll give you everything I have left for seven dollars."

"Oh, uh, I don't know..."

He tipped the lot onto the scale -- it was about three and a half pounds. "Come on, take it!"

"I'm not sure I could even use up that much..."

"Six dollars!"

"Oh... well... okay."

And so we wound up with what I would term a fairly astounding quantity of okra per capita here in the island nation of us. Of course I really have no idea how much okra ought to be costing a pound around here, but I wasn't sorry I did it. I didn't even feel compelled to branch out and try a new recipe. I just made our favorite one twice. It is from Suvir Suvan's and Stephanie Lyness's Indian Home Cooking, the cookbook that never stops giving. They call it "Stir-Fried Okra with Tomatoes, Onions, and Northern Spices". It is very simple and delicious if you do all your prep properly at the beginning. Here is how I make it. My instructions do feature a lot of steps, but this is all just a matter of getting your ducks in a row.

OKRA MASALA
1. Put 1 teaspoon whole cumin seeds and 1/3 cup vegetable oil in the bottom of a large pan suitable for frying things up in. It must have a lid that fits it well. Leave this alone for the moment.

2. Halve a medium onion and slice it thin. Put this in a small bowl and grate a 2" piece of ginger over top. Something to keep in mind any time you are planning to grate some fresh ginger, you can put it in the freezer first. Then it grates like a dream and you can put the remaining root right back in and it will keep just fine until next time.

3. In another small bowl put 1 tablespoon of ground coriander, 1/2 teaspoon of ground cumin, 1/2 teaspoon of turmeric, and 1/8 teaspoon of cayenne pepper.

4. In your third smallish container put 3/4 cup canned chopped tomatoes or ripe fresh tomatoes if you have them. Take half of a hot green chile like a jalepeno and mince it up very fine. Put this on top of the tomatoes. Add 1 teaspoon salt to this same bowl.

5. Squeeze 1/2 lemon into your final small bowl, and add a couple of tablespoons of chopped fresh cilantro.

6. Now it is time to prepare the okra. (Update: I use somewhere between a pound and a pound and a half for this recipe, with no pods over 3" long.) DO NOT GET IT WET. Make sure your cutting board and knife are dry. If there is any dirt or moisture on your okra, wipe it off with a dry cloth. Trim off the stem and pointy ends of every piece of okra and cut the pods crosswise into 1/2" pieces, more or less.

7. Turn the heat on under your pan to medium high. Cook, stirring, until the seeds get a bit brown and begin to smell divine.

8. Add the onion and ginger and cook, stirring, for about 3 minutes, until the onion is limp. One of the things you are doing here is driving out some of the moisture in these vegetables.

9. Turn the heat down to medium and add the spices. Stir for about half a minute.

10. Now add the okra. Stir to coat with the spices, and be thorough about it. Not only do you want to get the okra good and coated, you are also taking this opportunity to sear it slightly. For the right texture, you have to take the okra through a phrase of dry heat, then a gentle self steaming (coming up soon) in combination with dry heat, before any real liquid gets involved. This part should take a couple of minutes.

11. Cover the pan and let the okra cook for five minutes. Check on it a couple of times and give it a stir. If the spices are burning, you need to turn the heat down; if the okra isn't getting toasty at all, you need to turn it up. Some stuff will probably stick to the bottom of the pan, which is fine. You just don't want it to burn.

12. Take the cover off and add the tomato, chiles, and salt. Stir in a scraping kind of way -- the tomato juice loosens anything that's sticking to the bottom, and you want to be sure you get it all up. Then turn the heat down to low, replace the cover, and cook another five minutes.

13. Finally, take the cover off, turn the heat back up to high and cook until the okra is fully tender and the liquid has reduced down to something that clings to the okra, rather than puddling at all in the bottom of the pan. Add the lemon juice and cilantro. Taste for salt.

I like to make this ahead and then dump it into a pie pan or baking dish and reheat it in a 300° or 350° oven. This dries it out even more, in a nice way.

Posted by redfox at April 08, 2005 08:40 PM (recipes) | Comments (5)

Comments

Pickled okra. Yum!

Posted by Amy at April 10, 2005 12:14 PM

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