Ham Perloo (Purlow)

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Easter has come and gone. And with that comes the true joy of the season - ridiculously cheap hams. I don't even like ham as a meal, but I somehow like ham if it's *in* something. This dish definitely scratches that itch, so every year we run out and grab a ham, to make this and some split pea soup.

This dish that seems to be common in the south, and has about ten names - pilau, perloo, pirloo, purlow, pilaf, plov - so I'm not going to bother guessing at the right spelling of this. The other fun thing is that recipes online range from incredibly bland (cook some rice in what's basically ham water) to incredibly complicated (something resembling jambalaya). The closest I found to something reasonable was one of Emeril Lagasse's recipes, but it needed a bit of tweaking to squeeze out a bit more flavor and cook things in the right order. The recipe below is therefore modified a bit from his website with a few extra ingredients and steps.

This ham purlow dish is far from fancy, but it is definitely memorable. I recommend it if you have leftover ham or want a more mild version of jambalaya.

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.