Vegetable Plate

There is no shortage of vegetables available in the market now. Tonight's menu was:

fried cabbage

breaded okra

pole beans cooked with cured pork belly

mashed potatoes with pesto

These are all simple dishes, but especially good with local ingredients.

For the beans we boiled them with diced pork belly until the beans were tender. Bacon, salt pork, or ham would do also here. Salt this dish at the end because the pork will be salty and the salt will come out in the water and help to season the beans. Ours needed a little extra but if you salted in advance you would end up with too much.

For the potatoes, we peeled and boiled, then smashed with a hand masher. We made a simple pesto out of basil garlic, butter, and olive oil, then added the pesto to the mashed potatoes (to taste), along with half a cup of milk. We fished out the potatoes with a slotted spoon instead of pouring to reuse the boiling water for cabbage.

We boiled the cabbage in the potato water, shocked it in cold water, then sauteed it with a small onion and a cayenne pepper diced. We should have boiled it a little longer, as the spines took a while to lose their toughness. To compensate we dropped the temperature of the frying pan, covered it with a lid, and added a half-cup or so of the liquid from the beans to steam the cabbage. It was well cooked in the end but took a few extra minutes. Fortunately, we saved the least forgiving dish, the okra, until last, so no one had to stand by tapping their feet.

The okra got a covering of flour, then dredging in lightly beaten eggs and corn meal. They got deep fried. I realized halfway through that we didn't have any pepper sauce so I did a quick improv. with two cayenne peppers rough chopped 2/3 cup cider vinegar, and 1/2 t. salt (maybe more--I was doing it by sight). Liquify in blender, and you are good to go. It was great on both the okra and the cabbage

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