Monday Special - Summer Okra!

It's summer... so that means OKRA! Am I giving away my southern roots?? Oh well... the heat is here and with it comes the okra. It's at the market, in the stores and hey, even sprouting up in my garden (finally!).

Okra may be low in calories (only 30 per serving), but despite, it is packing some great nutrients to fuel your body. One serving of raw okra provides 22% of your daily recommended intake of folates, 17% thiamin, 36% vitamin C, 44% vitamin K, 43% manganese. It also adds to your calcium intake at 8% per serving. Think, only 90 calories of raw okra can get you almost 25% of your daily calcium - that's impressive!

However, cooking okra decreases most of these nutrients (some by more than half!). Luckily, vitamin k and calcium are retained despite cooking.
Okra can be prepared many ways - fried (which I do not recommend, of course), boiled, sauteed, lightly steamed (just lightly to avoid slime and retain the most nutrients), cooked in stews, pickled, or just plain raw (my favorite). When eating raw okra, try to select smaller pods as they are sweeter, or to add to a salad or other dish, chop up into smaller pieces if desired. A staple in my household is a mix of chopped okra, bell pepper, onion, cabbage, beans, corn, tomatoes, etc. We top off with some thyme or basil, hot sauce, or a lemon-garlic-zucchini dressing. The combinations are endless. Sometimes I dip it in hummus - yum!

If growing your own, keep close attention as it only takes 3 or 4 days from flowering for your okra to be ready to pick. If you wait for them to get very large, you risk them getting hard and not being very edible. If you miss some and they get too hard, pull them off so the nutrients can redirect to other pods. (You can save these pods for seeds for next planting if you like, but try to do this at the end of the season, again, so as to allow nutrients to flow to other pods.) Try to harvest when they are only a couple inches long or so. You can store them in a bag in the fridge or freeze them if you are blessed with an abundance! 

If you don't have your own plant, go to the market and get some okra (I have found okra I get at the market lasts twice as long as the okra at the grocery store). It's in season, at height of freshness and hopefully priced to sell! The variety of dishes are many and oh, did I mention it's low in calories and good for you? ;)