cooking
Oh, I’d better cook something up to show you, hadn’t I?
Foraging:
Well, I suppose this isn’t strictly cooking but it may well find its way there eventually. For the last couple of months or so I’ve been getting into foraging. While foraging is something I had wanted to learn about, I never had the opportunity until my friend Janelle invited me to this foraging trip in Durham with several other people. On a lovely Saturday morning, we spent a few hours walking slowly and staring intently at all things green and brown on the ground. Any objects in the shape of a leaf were immediately suspected of being delicious.
Before the trip, I had thought foraging meant bags and bags of edible plants and mushrooms. In reality, we saw few things that qualified as edible and fewer that were sufficiently ethical to harvest. Nevertheless, from this and two other subsequent trips, I learned to be excited about ramp and Indian cucumber. I also learned that skunk cabbage is smelly and not good to eat. But I got excited about them anyway. If you spot skunk cabbage, you spot water, which, like welding, is a very useful skill to have for any aspiring bridge builders… And I took pictures.
I lied about the okra. I bought these from the Indian store which I will talk about next (the okra, not the store). On the trip I met Trey and Derek, who were from Texas but had recently moved to CT from Virgin Islands. Trey made an observation: here in temperate climate, a plant’s appearance doesn’t tell you much. You have to refer to books and guides to really figure out whether they’ll kill you if you eat them. In tropical regions, plants announce loudly to you whether they are edible or not. It’s much easier to tell: their sight and smell are almost always inviting. I instantly thought about all the fresh and delicious vegetables I had as a kid. And there were mangoes, peaches, jack fruits, watermelons… I also thought about bitter gourd and the first person who saw it and cheerfully thought to themselves, “I reckon that will be quite tasty to eat!”
Okra and poi leaf:
I started buying okra perhaps over a month ago. While browsing the produce section at the Indian farmers market in Orange, I noticed the okra was getting a lot of attention. It was literally being bought as food in broad day light! Not wanting to be left out, I joined the frenzy and ended up with a pound or so. The excitement, however, immediately turned into cold realization that I would have to cook them while having absolutely no idea what that entailed. So I did what any rational person would do: have a small panic in the car on the way home, stuff the prized purchase in a far corner of the fridge, and promptly forget about it.
But the day finally came when I cooked it. Apparently something high in acidity can significantly reduce okra’s sliminess. I considered Sprite but eventually settled for balsamic vinegar. The first attempt was actually a success. I sautéed okra with olive oil, this Asian bean paste, and a whole lot of hot pepper flakes. The flavors went really well together and the okra offered a nice crunchy texture. I actually did not even mind the slime which, it had to be said, was aplenty even with the balsamic vinegar intervention. I put my tolerance for this down to the early exposure to a great variety of vegetables, some of which indeed had this quality.
Poi leaves, for instance, can be slimy once you’ve cooked them. So naturally, in Vietnamese cuisine, we couple them with another vegetable that produces twice the viscosity (the name is corchorus capsularis for those (un)interested). This may sound odd to some but we make a soup with them, flavored by shrimps, or better yet, freshwater field crab meat. I have not had this dish in years and would consider committing certain petty crimes to eat it again.