Dinner From the Depths of the Veggie Bin

About author / Amy Powell

World traveler; gourmet 30 minute meals; lover of exotic ingredients; winner on FoodTV's Chefs vs City; graduate French Culinary Institute. Her recipes will tantalize your taste buds.

Have you ever found yourself staring at a refrigerator full of partially used up produce? Perhaps half a head of red lettuce just this side of crisp is cushion the weight of three green onions, half a lime, and a single Persian cucumber. And in the next vegetable bin over some carrots and celery leftover from a ragu recipe are now sprouting and fading, respectively, into a sickly shade of yellow.

For a moment, you are threatened with kitchen paralysis. The vegetables are still good enough to cook with but just not healthy enough to be inspiring. Meanwhile the conservationist inside you forbids throwing away any vegetable until it is far enough gone to sport a nice fuzzy coat of mold.

I found myself in just such a situation this past week. My lack of inspiration and the mostly full bins of partially used up vegetables required an intervention. I failed to connect the dots in my head so I got to work with pen and paper taking inventory of everything that was useable, hoping, with fingers firmly crossed, that a path to dinner and out of this quagmire of produce would reveal itself.

Onions, garlic, ginger, check. Carrots and celery, check. Cucumbers and half a bunch of broccoli rabe, check. Then jackpot: half a pound of tender green okra. Now there was a vegetable I could work dinner around.

My favorite way to cook okra by far is Indian style, fried in the wok with spices and onions until the harsh vegetal taste mellows out and melds with the caramelized onions. But I wasn’t letting myself off the refrigeration excavation hook quite so easy. The okra would need some other veggie friends if I was every going to clear out those bins.

Onions, garlic, and ginger were easy. But to add into my medley I was thinking about another green that takes well to a sauté: broccoli rabe. The okra would take a bit longer to cook but I could get the sauté going and add in the chopped broccoli rabe towards the end. The spices and sweet onions would make a nice balance to the bitterness of the broccoli rabe particularly if I hit the mixture with some acid from a fresh squeezed lemon at the end.

To round out my South Asian inspired meal, I thought a couple of lamb blades marinated in a mixture of cumin, coriander, cardamom, chili powder, and cinnamon would be nice alongside the greens. A quick pickle of the Persian cucumber in sherry vinegar and whole grain mustard would serve as a condiment with a mild kick. Round that out with fluffy basmati rice and I would have a whole meal, plus a few less vegetables clogging up my fridge.

Inspiration is not always easy to come by when staring down a lot of food with no clear purpose. Sometimes a thing as simple as writing a list can bring clarity. And with clarity, a delicious meal, perhaps built around the marriage of okra and broccoli rabe, is not far away.

Serves/Makes: 4

• 3/4 pound small, tender okra
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1 medium onion
• 1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 piece (1-inch size) ginger
• salt and pepper
• 1/2 bunch broccoli rabe
• 1 lemon