Thursday, October 20, 2011

The Metamorphosis, Okie edition...*

No giant man-roaches, just a delectable transformation from this...


To this...

Forget that horrid, slimy, breaded, undercooked mess that restaurants try to pass off as "fried okra." The only acceptable way to cook okra is to lightly coat it with cornmeal, salt, and pepper (no breading and for god's sake no batter) and then fry it in a hot cast-iron skillet until it's crunchy, crispy and almost black (it's actually not quite done in this pic...).

Any other way is simply an abomination...

That represents the year's last batch of okra from the "Stick It To Big Agri-Business Revolutionary Garden." Never thought I'd still be getting okra on October 18. Maybe there's a silver lining to catastrophic climate change, after all...

This year's garden was a mixed bag. We ended up with a good okra crop, and our squash and zucchini harvest needed to be measured in metric tons. On the other hand the seventy-odd days of hundred-degree (and often much higher) heat completely shut down most everything else. None of the watermelon, tomatoes, eggplant or bell peppers produced anything until it started cooling down.

So now I've got tons of green tomatoes, tiny eggplants and itsy-bitsy melons, all doomed since we got our first good freeze last night.

Just as well, really. Duck season's nine days away, quail season opens Nov. 12 and I guess if I can muster the interest there's also a deer season or two mixed in there somewhere. Fall is no time to be messing around with vegetables, anyway...

* with apologies to Franz Kafka's dried-up exoskeleton...

6 comments:

  1. Chad

    The internet is full of Green tomato recipes, some of them must be OK, but the tiny egg plants (they're known as Aubergines here) Are they still so little that the look eggish? If so you're in for a treat as they are perfect for loads of thai recipes. The Melons? Frozen cocktails?

    SBW

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  2. Amen to the okra recipe! Just the way my wife does it, and any other preparation is blasphemy!

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  3. Fry those green tomatoes the same way you do the okra, but put a little butter in the skillet.

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  4. Damn, I could stand some fried okra right about now. And those little egglplants... had them at my local Indian place the other day. Damn!

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  5. this post actually made me go out and buy some last night, the were pretty sorry in comparison to to yours, but i cooked 'em just the same and they were good.

    How are the Melon cocktails coming along?
    SBW

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  6. How do you lightly coat the okra in cornmeal? This looks like the way my grandfather once made okra.

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