Sandra's voilà

Project 3 - Cooking Okra

Four years ago I started  a food garden.  The first year the garden produced hordes, but it was very  disorganised.  I have planted whole packets of seeds and it seemed like it all germinated!  My family ate loads of vegetables for more than a year and I dished baskets of veggies out to every visitor.  We had  colour on the breakfast plate(lettuce and tomato goes with everything!), fresh garden salads for lunch and more veggies for supper!

The second year I was a little more organised and tried companion planting as I read that was the way to go.  I did not have any bugs, but my produce was not that much.  I was not sure that that was the way for me!  But I still do it!  We have a couple of chickens, three ducks and a lot of wild birds feeding from this garden as well, so I didn't want to use any pesticides.  That year we had a lot of carrots!  Only thing that was too muhc.  Oh, I forgot about the celery!  What on earth do you do with a lot of celery?  The celery was actually the previous years plant that seeded themselves!

The third year I have pumpkins!  I have given away, sold some and still eating frozen pumpkin!

This year my garden looked great and I thought that it would be the best year ever!  Unfortunately  we had a very bad hailstorm in December with hail bigger than eggs, and the garden was totally demolished.  A couple of seeds germinated after the storm, but the overall produce was not as good. 

Every year I plant something that is either difficult to grow or that I am not familiar with.
I have tried growing asparagus, yellow beans, yellow tomatoes and okra.

On Tuesday I was harvesting cherry tomatoes when I saw this strange looking green thing on my only 'cucumber plant' that I have nursed so well!   To my surprise it was an okra!  I have never seen okra in real life!  Chuffed with my find, I came to the Internet to search what to do with the fruit/vegetable!  I still do not know what to call it.  It is not something you get in every shop in South Africa.  Even when I told my friend about my 'green thing', they did not even know what it was.

Well, I got some recipes, and decided to combine two that looked the easiest.  To my surprise my 16 year old son thought this was very delicious and finished almost everything himself!  After the first years veggies morning, noon and night he is not very pleased to eat vegetables too often!  More to say something unfamiliar and not sweet!

This is how I cooked my okra.....

I sliced the okra and aloud it to stand for a while.  Apparently it goes gooey and slimy sometimes.  Then I  mixed cornflower and Marsala, dipped the okra in it to cover it overall.  I personally think this helped with the slimy bit.  Then I deep fried it in vegetable oil.  I seasoned it with salt and freshly grounded pepper afterwards. Scrumptious ....delicious....and I suppose not so healthy deep fried!  But it was great.  Worthwhile planting this again!