Farmers market conjures delicious memories

My wife and I came home from the Wilson County farmers market Saturday morning with tomatoes, peas, peaches, blueberries and one more thing — okra. We would share the tomatoes, peas, peaches and blueberries. The okra was for me alone. She doesn't like okra. Never did. Never will. Whenever the matter is raised, she uses the S-word to describe it — slimy.

I, on the other hand, grew up in a household where okra was on the table several times a week and where a row or two of okra spread their broad, notched leaves and upright, fuzz-covered pods in our garden each year. My mother would hand me a bucket and a kitchen knife when I came home from school and tell me to cut her a mess of okra for dinner. She would clean the seed pods and slice them into half-inch cylinders, which were dipped into flour and fried in an iron skillet coated with bacon grease. Fried okra is a delicacy, crispy on the outside and soft and moist inside — not slimy. Mother's fried okra was battered with flour, not the corn meal I find at the few restaurants serving fried okra. I think the flour presents more of the okra's flavor.

In my mother's kitchen, okra could also be used for flavoring vegetables. Three or four pods of okra cook in a four-quart pot full of Crowder peas gave the peas a fresh, spicy flavor more vibrant than the usual fatback or ham seasoning. Okra was an integral ingredient in my mother's incomparable vegetable soup, a soup that, defying conventional culinary theories, contained no meat stock, consisted entirely of tomatoes, white corn, butterbeans, okra and a flour-based thickening. It was so good, I used to eat leftovers cold and congealed right out of the refrigerator. I have tried to duplicate that soup, but I cannot match its flavor.

Saturday afternoon, I shelled the peas we had bought, and on Sunday I cleaned and sliced the okra, rolled the slices in all-purpose flower and fried it in a small skillet. The result was a dinner that, while not perfect, was delicious, and not at all slimy.

On Sunday afternoon, with the temperature above 90, my wife and I decided to avoid the heat and lie down and read in our bedroom. Each of us, side by side, absorbed in a novel, lost track of the time until we realized the afternoon was gone and the shadows had stretched across the back yard. The afternoon was a reward for having caught up on household and gardening chores, and it obeyed that commandment about a day of rest. If there is a better, more relaxing or more economical way to spend a hot summer afternoon, or a cold winter winter Sunday or a rainy afternoon any time of the year than lying in bed with a book and a companion with her own book, I haven't found it.