Eating what’s “hot” when it’s hot!

In Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Vegetable Miracle she urges us to digress to a time-- before trucks burned fossil fuel ad nauseam to transport fresh vegetables coast to coast--when we had no choice but to eat what was grown locally. Where I grew up--in Maine in the 50’s and well into the 70’s--there only was local produce. Kingsolver’s wonder-filled book encourages us to buy local produce and be creative in eating it every way imaginable until that crop runs out and the next abundant vegetable crops up to challenge us to do it all over again. Animal Vegetable Miracle is a veritable gold mine of Kingsolver’s family’s experiences doing just that and it even contains recipes we all can use.
In support of Kingsolver's recommendations, my friends and I have been experimenting, in the past four to six weeks, with Red Malabar Spinach and Silver Queen Okra in a variety of ways. Here’s what we’ve come up with so far. Kudos to my friend Rachel for her diligence and her creative contributions!

red malabar spinach

Red Malabar Spinach: I stuffed spinach leaves as big as my hand with cooked rice, spices, and raw ground beef. I removed the leaf stem with a v-cut to flatten each leaf. Each leaf, shiny side down, then rolled up easily (roll from side to side, not lengthwise) and held up really well in the oven at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. I just added a little boiling water to the bottom of the Pyrex dish so the steam would cook the meat and leaves. Delicious!  Have you seen the price of bell peppers lately?

My friend, Rachel, steams the spinach over water sprinkled with some red balsamic vinegar. She said the aroma of the vinegar cooks into the spinach. Once cooked, she serves it with a little drizzle of red wine vinegar.

silver queen okra

Silver Queen Okra: This recipe shows how to roast the okra (with or even without tomatoes, it is great!). Rachel also added garlic powder and cumin to this recipe (which I’ve tried & loved!...especially the garlic flavor that gets roasted in with the olive oil and kosher salt). OoolaLA!

Rachel has also created a new sauce she calls “Okra marinara”: Slice okra into 1/2 inch slices and sauté them with some chopped tomato, olive oil, spices, garlic and onion. The end result is soft okra in a tomato sauce. It turns out more liquefied than roasting, but is very tasty. One of our next experiments will involve slicing the okra lengthwise and stir frying them…

Don't miss reading the related articles below about Okra. The one from Megan Murphy provides a great explanation for the way okra responds to roasting and how it keeps it from being "slimy" (a word I avoid using at any expense). Below it, the article from Knownews.com suggests cooking okra leaves or eating them raw in salads! Wow, got to try that...

We hope these suggestions will help integrate these hot weather crops into your diet. You just have to trust that when the weather is hot, there is still plenty of produce to eat. That equates to eating what grows best in the heat! Soon we’ll be reporting on black-eyed peas and yardlong beans. So adjust, relax, and enjoy the natural bounties that summer wants to bring you. Bon appétit! PS. And if you have not read Animal Vegetable Miracle yet, you are ignoring a major shift in consciousness concerning what you eat and where it comes from. It is time to get on board!

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