You say “okra.” I say “gumbo.”
Okra. Gumbo! Okra. Gumbo!
I was about 10 years old when I discovered okra. It was on a trip to see Uncle Bob and his family in Omaha, Nebraska. I stuffed myself silly with his munchy, crunchy pickled okra. After that excursion, my mom started buying the canned stuff, as a treat. I wasn’t a kid who snatched sweets late at night; I slipped briny pickled okra spears from the jar, hoping no one noticed.
By the time that I was old enough to grow my own okra, I was also growing my own family. There wasn’t time to pickle pods, so I snipped them off the tall, slender stalks until I amassed enough to cook with them. Then I cracked open cookbooks in search of ideas.
If you look up “okra” in most any cookbook index, a recipe for gumbo usually makes the list. That’s what I made. Again and again. Now, I can’t think “okra” without thinking “gumbo.”
This shrimp gumbo recipe is adapted from one for spicy chicken gumbo printed in the 1994 edition of the “More-with-Less Cookbook.” Talk about versatile. You can swap the shellfish for chicken. Add andouille. Mix surf and turf in the same pot. Amp up the spice. Just don’t nix the okra.
Fellow gumbo lovers: Please, don’t get all huffy about what this recipe does not call for. I don’t have celery growing in my garden right now nor gumbo filé in my pandemic pantry. This is ad hoc gumbo for ad hoc times.
Credit: Ligaya Figueras
Credit: Ligaya Figueras
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