In the Kitchen Right Now
In the kitchen right now · Zone 10a
Cooking the survivors
Late summer · August and September
Late summer cooking down here is not about variety. It's about the handful of things tough enough to still be standing, and knowing what to do with them so nobody at the table complains. Good news is the fruit trees are carrying this whole season.
Coming out of the yard
What I'm actually cooking with
- Okra. At peak you pick it daily, and you pick it small. Two to three inches. Any bigger and you're chewing rope.
- Callaloo and sweet potato leaves. Both cook down like spinach with more backbone. Garlic, onion, a little heat, done.
- Malabar spinach. Cut it and it comes back. It goes slick if you boil it hard, so keep the heat moderate.
- Boniato. Drier and sweeter than a regular sweet potato. Store it cool and dry, never in the fridge.
- Chayote and long beans. The backbone of a Haitian legume. This is the time of year they show up in mine.
- Peppers, Everglades and cherry tomatoes. The only tomatoes still setting fruit in this heat.
- Starfruit, guava, sugar apple, atemoya, passion fruit, avocado, papaya, banana. All in season at the same time, which almost never happens.
- Longan. Eat it in August. By September it's gone.
What I'm making with it
On repeat this month
- Legume. Chayote, long beans, whatever green is winning that week, cooked down soft the way my grandmother did it. This dish is the reason I grow chayote at all.
- Okra stewed, not fried. Cooked with tomato and a little acid so it holds together instead of turning into glue.
- Boniato mashed instead of potato. Sweeter, drier, and it takes butter and garlic like it was waiting for them.
- Guava anything. Paste, jelly, or split over ice cream. Main crop is right now so this is the cheap season for it.
- Starfruit sliced into everything. Salad, water, on top of fish. It's the one fruit that makes people ask what it is.
- Callaloo on rice. Weeknight dinner in under twenty minutes when nothing else in the yard cooperated.
Not yet, so don't go looking. Roselle is planted in late August but the calyces are not ready until November, so there is no sorrel this month. And if you cook yuca, the root has to be washed, scraped and cooked through, never eaten raw, and never eat the leaves raw either. That one is not a preference, it's chemistry.