Okra is a favorite vegetable around here, so I always try to grow it every summer. It’s not difficult to grow, but I find it to be the ninja of gardening.  Everyone says okra is easy to grow, and I would agree, but no one mentions what a pain it is to harvest!

If I turn my back on it for a second during these full, busy summer days, it silently and immediately turns from innocent, beautiful hibiscus-like flower to 3-foot long pods that could plausibly be a murder weapon.  With okra, size does matter, and big okra pods, while they appear to just be “more okra,” are actually inedible.  I can’t even slice through them with our sharpest, carbon-steel knife, the one we use for butchering because it slices easily through tough hide and sinew!

There seems to be no middle ground for okra.  I laugh to myself in January when I am reading seed catalogue descriptions of okra varieties that say things like, “best picked between 2-4 inches,” an apparently mythical period in okra development.

However, after many unsuccessful okra years, I finally found an okra I am happy with.  It’s a variety from India called Evertender okra, that has proved itself to still be edible, even in my garden!

A new vegetable I am growing this year, and am pleased to test out in the kitchen, are edible luffa gourds.  They are strange-looking, and I hesitated because they looked so tough.  Fried up just like okra, however, they proved to be delicious, and gave off a perfume-like smell while cooking (it vanished by the time we were eating it).

 

 

 

Southern Fried Okra (or Luffa gourds)

3 cups sliced okra pods (Less, if you, like me, fail to find them in the mythical tender stage!)

1/2 cup corn flour

1/2 cup wheat flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

1/4-1/2 cup fat for frying (I use chicken fat (schmaltz), or lard, but olive oil or ghee would also be good)

1.  Mix the flours, salt and pepper together with a fork (I ground them fresh, and the wheat flour was whole wheat).
2. Shake the dry ingredients over the okra while the oil is heating in a frying pan.
3. When the oil/fat is quite hot, scoop the okra out of the flour with a slotted spoon, shaking off any extra flour, and put it in to fry.
4. Fry until golden and crispy.  Serve immediately!

 

 

 

The same for the luffa gourds:

 

 

 

 

Just slice them and proceed with the recipe.  They had a very different flavor than the okra, a bit like zucchini, but they fried up very nicely.