pint or so okra, sliced into rounds - Greensgrow.shrimp stock (or any other stock) - homemade.Serves 2 as a meal, 4 as not really a meal As with all simple cooking, it’s the quality of the ingredients that truly matters. NOTE: I would seriously encourage you to orchestrate some homemade stock into this dish. It was claimed that this may have been the best thing I have cooked in the past six months. And sometimes fast.īorn was this uncomplicated and somehow deeply flavorful stew roughly based on the many varieties of ancestral gumbo cooked throughout West Africa, especially Senegal and Nigeria. Across this largely tropical coast, history and ecology have produced rich and entirely unique cuisines that also happen to rely on very few available resources and ingredients. When it came time to turn my okra into dinner, I was so exhausted from lugging 40 lb bags of mushroom poop up three flights of stairs to my third story garden that all I could possibly take on was something relatively fast and super simple. It’s been part of local cultures for centuries…defining textural tastes ( neba neba!)…thickening traditional dishes ( gumbo’s got roots too)…supposedly even keeping Cleopatra’s skin free and clear of any unsightly acne. Okra is a dietary staple from West Africa through the Sahara and across Asia to Japan. And those aren’t hard to come by for this little “finger” food. What better way to enjoy a superfood than with roots. And with almost no accompanying calories, fat or cholesterol, this superfood is a golden ticket to health, weight loss, happiness, and, at $3.50 a pound, a fatter wallet too. Look out for a blast of vitamin C, folate (a B vitamin that your red blood cells love), calcium and potassium too. It bulks, greases, detoxes, feeds your healthy probiotic gut bacteria…intestine heaven. The mucilaginous fiber contained in the pods is like compost for your poop. If my description of okra’s many fine qualities has you grimacing with disgust, keep in mind that it also happens to be a nutritional powerhouse, especially when it comes to healthy digestion. The longer the pod, the more likely it has grown woody. Nice combo of pretty green and purple varietals with dainty pods, which is good when you’re talking okra. So when I saw it for $3.50 a pound at Greensgrow’s Saturday market ( try $8 at some other farm stands ) I was all over it. There’s really nothing else like the texture of good, young, fresh, homegrown okra. I almost constantly crave the seductively silky slime that oozes between the bright bubble-like seeds of the tender pod.
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