![]() ![]() Since these ingredients will cook at different times, be sure you use multiple bowls.ĭice your onion and tomato. Gather your ingredients and find a nice clean space in your kitchen to work.Īfter many years of messy counters, I learned to use mixing bowls to toss ingredients in as they are prepped. The key to tasty stewed Okra? Start with fresh okra.Īfter looking into all of the amazing health benefits, you’ll want to taste this veggie for yourself.Ĭheck out my follow-up post to learn more! By adding water and stewing, you can eliminate this gooeyness. Note: The sun dried tomatoes I used were not preserved in olive oil, so no more calories were added to the dish.When you cook okra, it begins to release a gel-like juice (similar to cactus and aloe). The sun dried tomatoes gave a wonderful deep colour to the sauce as well as rich flavour and the only risk of adding more calories is to mop up that delicious sauce with lots of crusty bread!! The outcome was more than I expected and the okra were very delicious. I also didn’t know if my the children would like them but as we say in Greece, “Ο Τολμών Νικά” (O Tolmon Nika – he who dares, wins). I thought it would be a great idea to use them, although a little risky as I didn’t know what the outcome would be. Suddenly a light bulb flashed into my head, like in the cartoons. ![]() When I was cooking this dish yesterday, when I reached out for the canned tomatoes and the tomato paste I saw the sun dried tomatoes in the cupboard. If I need to add some sweetness to a stew I add a grated carrot and if it doesn’t pair with the dish, I add some honey instead. I find that Greek tomatoes are so sweet and delicious that this is not needed. Sugar is added to the sauces to balance the acidity of tomatoes and although at the early stages of cooking I did use a pinch of sugar in my sauces, mainly because I watched Vefa (the first Greek Cook who had a cooking show on T.V.) using it. Many people add some sugar in recipes with tomato sauces. However, in Greece dill is used a lot and you can buy it anywhere, whereas you rarely find fennel fronds in Greece, unless you live in the countryside where it grows abundantly and you can find it some times at the farmers’ market, so I always have some at home to use. In the traditional Greek and Cypriot recipe, which is the same, no garlic is added but I have revisited some of my cooking habits and now I add it in many recipes.Īnother ingredient I have been using lately together with tomatoes, is tomato paste, which adds rich flavour to a dish.ĭill is another ingredient I was not really fond of because there was no dill in Cyprus (just fennel fronds) and you will not find it in any Cypriot recipes. I now use a non stick sautéing pan and with only 2 tablespoons olive oil (240 calories), the dish is lighter and healthier but keeps all the taste and flavour. In the traditional way of cooking “mpamies” you needed at least 1/2 cup of olive oil (950 calories) to shallow fry mpamies and then they were removed to the saucepan and the sauce was made in the remaining oil. I suppose you are wondering how can I be eating “ladera” when olive oil has so many calories? The answer is the way of cooking. Now that I am on diet, I cook “ladera” at least once a week.įor those of you who don’t know what “ladera” is, this is our Greek vegetarian dishes, which can be anything with seasonal vegetables, cooked with olive oil, because olive oil is their main condiment. To be frank I prefer them because they taste just as good and you save a lot of time without having to do the above procedure. This time of the year there are no fresh okra in Greece so I used frozen ones. Mpamies start appearing at the Greek farmers’ markets around early July. ![]()
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