• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
Exterminating Angel Press

Exterminating Angel Press

Creative Solutions for Practical Idealists.

  • Home.
  • Our Books.
  • About Us.
    • What EAP’s About.
    • Why Exterminating Angel?
    • Becoming Part of the EAP Community.
    • EAP’s Poetry Editor Speaks!
    • Contributors.
    • EAP Press.
  • EAP: The Magazine.
    • EAP: The Magazine Archive
  • Tod Blog.
  • Jam Today.
  • Contact Us.
  • Cart.

Okra. Yes. Really. OKRA.

September 1, 2010 by Exangel

I love okra. I really do. And not just because it’s a strange outsider, looked at askance by the modern world. I mean, I hate kidneys (one of the few foods I do dislike, after an unfortunate bout making a steak and kidney pie which left my kitchen smelling like a New York sidewalk on a summer day).  Just because it is what it is. Pretty. Modest. Unpretentious. A riot of different textures.

I ate it a lot when we lived in England, since every Asian market carried it–bhindi is its name on the Indian menus that were always my fallback position in provincial towns where you took your life in your hands every time you went into a restaurant that didn’t serve poppadums. I always ordered them. And at home, I cooked them in curried vegetable sautes on top of rice with lots of chutney (or ‘pickle’ in the UK).

But my favorite way to cook okra was and is Madhur Jaffrey’s way, which she claims is Japanese. Very likely. Whatever its nationality it’s terrific…and comforting, too.  Also the perfect hot weather side dish. So I was very pleased when a heap of the pale green stuff appeared at a local farmers’ market. Someone’s growing it around here. Thanks for that. Of course I scooped it up and brought it home to have for dinner.

This is how:

As many okra as you feel like having. It’s easier if they’re all around the same size. Madhur Jaffrey picks through the heap to find the smallest ones, and I do that too, when there ARE smallest ones. But it’s still a pleasure if they’re all medium to large.

She recommends about 24 okra for 4 servings, but that, I think, is REALLY a side dish, implying a lot of other side dishes to come…for us, 24 is the least we’ll eat. On the other hand, we do, as I say, love okra. You’ll have your own ideas.

Bring a pan of water to the boil. Doesn’t have to be a big one, just big enough to hold all the okra under water. Add the okra to the boiling water, and bring back to the boil, boil for about 2 minutes–or until when you bite into one, it’s just tender and nowhere near overcooked mush.

Drain. Rinse with cold water to stop the cooking. Drain again.

Cut into 1/2 inch lengths, discarding the tops. Now you can either mix it with the sauce, or set it aside and mix at the last minute. Jaffrey says to mix at the last minute. But I kind of like it marinated a little.

Try it both ways and see what you think.

For the sauce for about 24 okra:  2 Tablespoons soy sauce to 1 teaspoon mirin, with a little smudge to taste of wasabi paste mixed in.  If I cook more, I adjust upward, of course.

It’s good room temperature, but I like it best chilled.

And I like it really best chilled nestled up against a tangle of hot linguine mixed with butter, soy sauce, chili oil, minced scallions, and diced, salted cucumber (just dice, toss with some coarse salt in a colander, let sit for about a half hour, then squeeze out extra liquid…add to the noodles at the last minute before you serve).  That’s what we had the other night. If I’d had some cilantro, I would have chopped that and added it to the noodles with the cucumber.

Extra soy sauce and butter on the table to add at will.

We’d both had a very hard day–hell, a very hard WEEK–and there is nothing like butter and soy sauce on noodles to comfort you at the end of a tough run of anything. Unless it’s soy sauce and butter on noodles next to chilled okra, soy sauce, and wasabi. That’s the most comforting of all.

Filed Under: Jam Today Tagged With: noodles with butter and soy sauce, okra

Primary Sidebar

Cart.

Check Out Our Magazine.

In This Issue.

  • Who Was Dorothy?
  • Those Evil Spirits.
  • The Screaming Baboon.
  • Her.
  • A Tale of Persistence.
  • A Conversation with Steve Hugh Westenra.
  • Person Number Twelve.
  • Dream Shapes.
  • Cannon Beach.
  • The Muse.
  • Spring.
  • The Greatness that was Greece.
  • 1966, NYC; nothing like it.
  • Sun Shower.
  • The Withering Weight of Being Perceived.
  • Broken Clock.
  • Confession.
  • Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse.
  • Sometimes you die, I mean that people do.
  • True (from “My Life with Dogs”).
  • Fragmentary musings on birds and bees.
  • 12 Baking Essentials to Always Have in Your Poetry.
  • Broad Street.
  • A Death in Alexandria.
  • My Forked Tongue.
  • Swan Lake.
  • Long Division.
  • Singing against the muses.
  • Aphorisms from “What Remains to Be Said”.

In The News.

That cult classic pirate/sci fi mash up GREENBEARD, by Richard James Bentley, is now a rollicking audiobook, available from Audible.com. Narrated and acted by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio, you’ll be overwhelmed by the riches and hilarity within.

“Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges is your typical seventeenth-century Cambridge-educated lawyer turned Caribbean pirate, as comfortable debating the virtues of William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, and compound interest as he is wielding a cutlass, needling archrival Henry Morgan, and parsing rum-soaked gossip for his next target. When a pepper monger’s loose tongue lets out a rumor about a fleet loaded with silver, the Captain sets sail only to find himself in a close encounter of a very different kind.

After escaping with his sanity barely intact and his beard transformed an alarming bright green, Greybagges rallies The Ark de Triomphe crew for a revenge-fueled, thrill-a-minute adventure to the ends of the earth and beyond.

This frolicsome tale of skullduggery, jiggery-pokery, and chicanery upon Ye High Seas is brimming with hilarious puns, masterful historical allusions, and nonstop literary hijinks. Including sly references to Thomas Pynchon, Treasure Island, 1940s cinema, and notable historical figures, this mélange of delights will captivate readers with its rollicking adventure, rich descriptions of food and fashion, and learned asides into scientific, philosophical, and colonial history.”

THE SUPERGIRLS is back, revised and updated!

supergirls-take-1

In The News.

Newport Public Library hosted a three part Zoom series on Visionary Fiction, led by Tod.  

And we love them for it, too.

The first discussion was a lively blast. You can watch it here. The second, Looking Back to Look Forward can be seen here.

The third was the best of all. Visions of the Future, with a cast of characters including poets, audiobook artists, historians, Starhawk, and Mary Shelley. Among others. Link is here.

In the News.

SNOTTY SAVES THE DAY is now an audiobook, narrated by Last Word Audio’s mellifluous Colby Elliott. It launched May 10th, but for a limited time, you can listen for free with an Audible trial membership. So what are you waiting for? Start listening to the wonders of how Arcadia was born from the worst section of the worst neighborhood in the worst empire of all the worlds since the universe began.

In The News.

If you love audio books, don’t miss the new release of REPORT TO MEGALOPOLIS, by Tod Davies, narrated by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio. The tortured Aspern Grayling tries to rise above the truth of his own story, fighting with reality every step of the way, and Colby’s voice is the perfect match for our modern day Dr. Frankenstein.

In The News.

Mike Madrid dishes on Miss Fury to the BBC . . .

Tod on the Importance of Visionary Fiction

Check out this video of “Beyond Utopia: The Importance of Fantasy,” Tod’s recent talk at the tenth World-Ecology Research Network Conference, June 2019, in San Francisco. She covers everything from Wind in the Willows to the work of Kim Stanley Robinson, with a look at The History of Arcadia along the way. As usual, she’s going on about how visionary fiction has an important place in the formation of a world we want and need to have.

Copyright © 2025 · Exterminating Angel Press · Designed by Ashland Websites