01 September 2017

Fish filets with tomatoes, onions, okra, and corn

Our lives right now are tomatoes, zucchini, and the dog. Cooking. Walks. Living at home, with a few trips each week to the supermarket. Watching coverage of the flooding and rescues in Texas and Louisiana. Now they say there's a new, powerful hurricane heading toward Cuba and southern Florida. Weather forecasting models have it moving up the U.S. East Coast toward North Carolina, where my mother and sister and other family members live.


So we'll just go about our quiet life here and stay in touch with events on the other side of the Atlantic. In between, there's a lot of water and a lot of weather. It somehow seems appropriate that we cooked and had a lunch of fish and tomatoes yesterday. It was based on a standard southern U.S. recipe called "okra and tomatoes" (photo above).



It's pretty simple. Fry some bacon or smoked pork lardons in a sauté pan. Add and let cook a couple of sliced or chopped onions until they are soft and slightly browned. Chop up four fresh tomatoes and add them to the pan, with any juice they release in the chopping process. When the tomatoes have started cooking down, add a dozen or so fresh okra, sliced into small pieces, or about half a pound of frozen sliced okra. (If you don't have or like okra, this would be good made with green beans...)




The okra will release a liquid that, combined with the slightly acidic and slightly sweet tomato liquid, will make a nice velvety sauce. When the okra is tender, add (optionally) a small can of corn kernels, or some frozen corn (which I've never seen here in France). We had a few small cans of Géant Vert (Green Giant) "extra crunchy" corn down in the pantry, so I opened one.

Cook the vegetables and bacon or lardons together on medium to medium-low heat until the sauce has reduced and thickened to your taste. Don't forget salt and pepper, and pinches of hot red pepper flakes, dried thyme, and ground cumin can add nice flavors too.


When the vegetables are nearly ready to serve, lay half a dozen fish filets, fresh or frozen, on top of the mixture, cover the sauté pan, and let the fish just steam through. Keep an eye on it so that the fish doesn't get overcooked. Serve the fish and vegetables with rice if you want.

10 comments:

  1. Looks delicious!
    Sadly we had to leave several kilos of beautiful, unpicked ripe tomatoes on the plants before we came back to the UK for moving house. We had made a huge quantity of sauce already and the freezer was full. Nobody we know needs any more tomatoes, it seems.
    I do hope your mother and sister stay safe and out of the hurricane's path. In fact I wish everyone could stay safe, if only it were possible.

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    1. Jean, I don't remember if I knew how many tomato plants you put in this year. We have 30 of them. We have made sauce but now need to start making tomato paste and/or oven-dried tomatoes. The tomatoes are ripening gradually, with a new basket full of them every day.

      With any luck, that hurricane, which is thousands of miles away off Africa right now, will turn another way and spare the North Carolina coast (and the rest of the U.S.).

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  2. This sounds, looks and might be delicious! Unlike many people, I like okras.

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  3. That first picture is amazing. I can almost taste it. I grew up with okra - it was everywhere in Texas home cooking. Like cornbread or black eyed peas or jalapenos. Didn't realize it's not everyone's favorite.

    Géant Vert...that's an easy brand to remember, lol.

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    1. We always had okra in N.C., either as fried okra (not my favorite) ar okra and tomatoes (yum). A lot of people think okra is too slimy. They don't know how to cook it.

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  4. Could be the making of a Coutbullion in Louisiana.. ...hmm mmm good.

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    Replies
    1. I had no idea that fish stew was called courtbouillon in Louisiana.

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    2. I didn't know that either, but I find plenty of recipes for Louisiana courtbouillon on the internet. Thanks for the comment, "Tommy"...

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