Quick Stewed Okra and Tomatoes

I just got back from Charleston, SC, where I had an amazing time and ate way too much food.  If you haven't been there, I can describe the food as French-influenced low country cooking with a healthy dose of Southern backbone.  So take all of the soul food you love - fried chicken, fried green tomatoes, shrimp and grits, collards - and put it alongside po' boys, remoulades, beignets, and all manner of creole food.  There's a kind of third culture mixed in - the Gullah people - who descended from slaves in South Carolina and Georgia.  They too are technically creole people, so it should come as no surprise that they also claim dishes like shrimp and grits, fried okra, and a wide variety of other dishes that come from some hazy part of the South that I can't quite seem to put a dotted line around.

The point of this ramble is simple - they have excellent food in Charleston.  And the trip there reaffirmed my love of okra, an underappreciated vegetable here in the North.  For the first time, I tried a new dish I hadn't heard of before - stewed tomatoes with okra - that I thought was spectacular.  Served alongside eggs, bacon, and the best grits I've ever eaten, this dish would replace a broiled tomato or a bowl of stewed tomatoes, which I have historically despised.  But if you add in okra's earthy vegetation and change up the texture of tomatoes by adding in the okra pods and seeds, it becomes something entirely different.  I made a version of this dish tonight based on what I thought it should taste like, and while the dish wasn't as brightly red colored as the one I had at Kitchen 208, they were also plated more thoughtfully, and had the same amazing flavor I've been craving for a whole week since my return.  So don't be afraid of okra, brave cooks, and push yourself to tackle this otherwise forgotten mallow.

Blackberry Chutney over Pork Medallions

If you're lucky, where you live is berry season right now.  You're probably seeing them popping up in the grocery store on sale - $2.99 for a 6 ounce tub, trucked in from nobody knows where (aka Mexico).  But a better alternative is getting up to a farm to buy them right off the bushes, or even to pick your own.  We went up this weekend and bought 10 pounds, adding to our 10 pounds of blueberries and 5 pounds of black raspberries from an earlier trip.  You may think that this sounds like too many, but I assure you, it is not.  We now have blueberry jalapeno jelly, raspberry jam, blackberry preserves, blackberry muffins, enough frozen berries to make smoothies through the year, and this gem.

Worried for about 5 minutes that maybe we went overboard with the blackberries, we went looking for recipes.  Good old Martha Stewart came through in a pinch, bringing us an assortment of about 20 different recipes ranging from desserts through drinks, with one savory dinner option.  This dish, pork medallions with a blackberry chutney, caught my eye, since I am a huge fan of the sweet / savory pairing, as well as the meats / sweets pairing.  The recipe looked easy, and we even had a couple of shallots lying around, so it was calling to us.  And the result was fantastic - tart, sweet, and with mellow caramel undertones from the molasses and sauteed shallots, we loved the blackberry chutney so much that we're trying to figure out what else we can serve it with.  So I have chosen to rearrange the name of this dish to showcase the chutney, which was by far the star in tonight's dinner.  It came together quickly, and had a short ingredient list, although you really do want good fresh berries, so some of the ingredients can be a bit fussy.  Don't make any substitutions beyond that, and you'll do really well with this dish.

If you can find it, get a pork tenderloin.  Not loin, that's too big and tough.  Tenderloin will do you well, and will cut up and cook easily.  We couldn't get our hands on one tonight, and used pork sirloin instead, which I think is a great runner up.  Otherwise, we followed Martha's recipe verbatim, which I reprint here.

Just a small fraction of the local blackberries we picked ourselves this weekend