Battered, fried okra of the sort they serve at meat-and-three restaurants in the South is a magnificent thing, and I ate a ton of it during my years in Alabama. Bhindi masala, the spicy okra dish common in Indian restaurants, is pretty great, too. Then there’s gumbo, and lots of African and Caribbean and Asian and Mediterranean okra dishes that I’d really like to try someday.

But when okra is fresh off the field, as it is these days at the farmer’s markets around me (the photo above was taken at the Thursday market in front of Columbia University), going to the effort of battering or spicing or stewing seems almost criminal. The okra is so flavorful on its own that cooking it with just a little bit of oil and salt is the best possible thing you can do with it.

I discovered this years ago, I think because I had bought some okra and was just too lazy to go the full Southern battered route. The recipe — if you can call it that — then became a family mainstay because when my son was a toddler, okra prepared this way was one of the only vegetables he would eat. Now, because it is okra season and most people north of the Mason-Dixon Line have no idea to do with the stuff, I’m out to proselytize the stuff, in part to ensure its continued availability at farmer’s markets. So here’s what you do:

1. Buy some okra, of the fresh, unblemished sort that is customary at farmer’s markets and can occasionally be found at supermarkets. Small pods are usually better than big ones, but the key differentiator is whether they feel slightly springy to the touch or kinda hard. You want springy. How much? Maybe 4-5 pods a person, although I’m perfectly capable of consuming 20 pods all by myself. Okra tends to be pretty expensive as veggies go — $6 a pound seems to be the standard price at the farmer’s markets I frequent; the very pretty ones above, though, went for $8.

2. Chop the okra into rounds of about half an inch. I discard the end and the tip of each pod, which is probably a waste. They’re perfectly edible, I’m just worried that they won’t cook well with the rest. Warning: this will get a little sticky. You may need to wash your knife midway, and you’ll definitely want to scrub the cutting board when you’re done.

3. Put a skillet (preferably cast-iron) on the stove and turn the heat up to medium. Pour in some olive oil and, if you like butter (I do!), throw in some of that too — although it’s really fine with just oil. Maybe a tablespoon of each if you’re cooking 20-25 pods.

4. Throw the okra into the skillet. The pieces will stick to each other at first, so you’ll need to spend some time with a spatula separating them and making sure they get coated with oil/butter. I add a pinch or two of salt at this point, but don’t put in too much. You can always add more when it’s done.

5. Cook, flipping the okra rounds over with a spatula pretty frequently, until most of them are brown on both sides. I used to go to great lengths make sure every single round got evenly browned, sometimes even picking them up one-by-one with tongs. But that’s really unnecessary.

6. Eat.

One day back in November I ordered a Berkshire pork loin roast (a little over two pounds) from the nice people at FreshDirect. I seemed to remember a previous such roast being a little dull, so I placed it the night before in my basic Thanksgiving turkey brine: salt, brown sugar, peppercorns, allspice, cloves, rosemary and thyme. And, you know, water.

I realize that it would be helpful if I gave the proportions, at least the salt-to-water proportions. I think it was something less than a cup of salt in two quarts of water, but don’t hold me to that. In any case, it was probably slightly too much salt, although nobody complained. I brought the brine to a boil, let it cool, then stuck the pork in it overnight in the fridge.

The next evening, I browned the pork on every side I could, with some butter, in a frying pan over medium-high heat. Then I set the frying pan aside and put the pork on a rack in a roasting pan in a 250-degree oven and left it there for a while. Maybe an hour-and-a-half?

Then I set about making spätzle, which I thought would be good with a pork roast. There had been a Kurt Guttenbrunner recipe in the Times in September for "Spaetzle With Corn, Peas, Braised Rabbit and Tarragon." The crucial excerpt:

For the spaetzle:

Salt

2 cups all-purpose flour

Freshly ground black pepper

Freshly ground nutmeg

2 large eggs

1/2 cup heavy cream plus 5 teaspoons

1/2 cup quark or fromage blanc or cottage cheese

Extra virgin olive oil.

and then this:

4. For spaetzle: place a large pot of lightly salted water over high heat to bring to a boil. Place flour in a large bowl and season to taste with salt, pepper and a pinch of nutmeg. Add eggs, 1/2 cup cream and quark; mix well. When water boils, press dough through a spaetzle maker directly into water. As noodles float to top, remove with a slotted spoon and transfer to a bowl. Mix with a bit of olive oil. Set aside.

The Dining section with this recipe had been sitting in our newspaper stack for a while, and I guess I had recently looked through it. I noticed that it called for quark, which before it became a subatomic particle was the German version of ricotta/cottage cheese, and sure enough they sell the stuff at Zabar’s. I didn’t notice the part about a "spaetzle maker" until I was already starting to mix the ingredients, so I improvised on that.

I initially tried to mix with a whisk, which got me nowhere. So I switched to the beaters and that worked but was messy. I then used a cheese grater to cut the dough into spätzle. It was a huge mess. I’d say maybe half the dough actually made it into the boiling water. But that half tasted really good.

Part of what made it taste so good was a cream sauce, which I made like this: I looked at the pan in which I had browned the pork, and there didn’t seem to be quite enough pork residue in there. So I cooked some chopped-up bacon in it too. Then I took out the bacon bits, and poured out most of the grease.

Then, I turned up the heat, and poured in some Barbancourt four-year-old dark rum (maybe a half cup?), mixed in a bunch of dijon mustard (maybe two tablespoons?), and cooked this down to a sizzling couple of tablesppons. After which I poured in a cup or so of cream, which I let sizzle down for about 10 minutes. That was the sauce. (If you don’t have Barbancourt rum, bourbon or brandy would suffice; most other dark rums wouldn’t, because they have a weird ammoniac taste that you wouldn’t want in a cream sauce. I do recommend Barbancourt rum, though, because it’s really good and because I think we should all do what we can to support the Haitian economy.)

The accompaniments were a salad, which included those bacon bits, and a beet, grated and sauteed in butter, with a little lime zest and lime juice added at the very last second. (The recipe’s in The Gourmet Cookbook).

Anyway, it all tasted really good. So good that I’ve been getting requests for the recipe, which I am only now getting around to posting.

Also, I asked for a spätzle maker for Christmas. And I got one! (They apparently cost only $8.95 at Zabar’s.)

So after Christmas I made spätzle again, this time mixing the dough in the Cuisinart and using the spätzle maker. Sadly, I put the spätzle maker together wrong, and made another mess (see photo).

The black rubber part is supposed to go on the bottom, not on the top. Since then I’ve been able to figure that out, and make lots and lots of spätzle. Also, I’ve used ricotta, which is a lot easier to find in stores other than the magical Zabar’s, instead of quark, and it seemed to work just fine.

I came very close to embracing an incipient Thanksgiving foodie trend this year and spatchcocking the turkey, as instructed by the Washington Post. But I lost my nerve at the last minute, partly because all the references to spatchcocking I found on the Web other than the Post story described it as a preparation best suited for grilling (it involves slicing through the backbone so you lay the bird flat). Plus the bird (from the Depaola truck at the Union Square greenmarket) was small enough to fit easily in a pot in the fridge. So I went again with what is becoming a pretty conventional Thanksgiving practice (we’ve been doing it for almost a decade) and prepared a brine.

I put in a bunch of kosher salt (can’t even remember now if it was 1.5 cups or 2.5), brown sugar, peppercorns, allspice, cloves, rosemary and thyme, and brought it all to a boil.

After letting the brine cool down I poured it into the pot with the turkey in it, and didn’t make too much of mess. About 20 hours later I pulled the turkey out (and did make a mess) and put it on its side on a rack in a roasting pan. I roasted it on that side at 400 degrees for 27 minutes (seemed like a good number), flipped it and roasted it on the other side for 27 minutes, then turned the oven down to 350, set the turkey breast side up and put some sweet potatos, parsnips and turnips under it, then poured in some turkey broth and white wine. It probably cooked about 90 or 100 minutes like that. I may have turned the oven down to 325 at some point.

It was the first time I had ever cooked a turkey without once consulting a cookbook. And it was good, really good. In past years I’ve sometimes overbrined. This year the turkey was moist with a hint of the herbs from the brine, but not soft or overspiced. In fact, I’m going to grab a hunk out of the fridge right now.

Okay, that’s done. The rest of the menu consisted of smashed potatoes, a really great soup of sweet potatoes and other root veggies that Mrs. By Justin Fox made a few weeks ago, green beans tossed in Dijon mustard and anchovy past.

And then there were the sweet potatoes, which I guess were redundant given the soup but we didn’t want to do without. I was initially thinking of slicing them into french-fry pieces and, well, frying them. But there wasn’t an appropriate pot available, so I altered a recipe for grated beets that we’ve been eating a lot of lately (it’s from the Gourmet Cookbook).

I grated two sweet potatoes together with one beet, fried ’em up in a skillet with butter like hash browns, then added a little grated lime zest and lime juice at the last minute.

It’s better with just beets.

Finally, the salad.

The beautiful watermelon radishes and multicolored carrots were from a really sweet little veggie stand at Union Square near the north entrance to the subway station. I made a dressing of orange juice and shallots and mustard. But it just wasn’t very good. It looked great, though.

It was this picture, in fact, that inspired my to write here for the first time in months and months. Not that it’s such a great picture, but the salad was beautiful. Plus, the rest of the family (including in laws) is in the next room working on the annual gingerbread house, which this year is a gas station. I said I was going to get to work on the book (I have a cleaned-up manuscript due Dec. 17), and this procrastination opportunity was just too good to pass up. Happy (post-)Thanksgiving!

This blog is now one of the world’s foremost online sources of culinary information about sea robins. Seriously, type “cooking sea robin” into the Google and my previous post on the topic shows up–today at least–in fourth place. As such, it’s been getting some traffic from sea robin aficionados, one of whom sent me this informative e-mail:

First thing, you got ripped. 5 dollars? Then again after spending 50 bucks on a party boat to catch a few fluke means the few sea robins I took in actually cost more than that … but anyway, you have to fillet them and deep fry the fillets. They are quite good, but you will still have a few smallish bones that come out easily after cooking. Only a big one will get you decent fillets, it takes a skilled hand to fillet a smaller one. … People still look at me funny when I take a few sea robins home for dinner. They are aesthetically ugly fish (though divers seem to think they are beautiful) but no uglier, my wife contends, than any flatfish … perhaps that’s why no market ever developed for them.

This is a sea robin. At least, that’s what Captain Rick called it last Friday. A friend who stopped by as I was getting ready to cook it said that, when she fished off Shelter Island as a kid, her dad referred to such things as “garbage fish.”

Rick sells lots of perfectly normal fish (filets of tuna, flounder, etc.) at his stand at the 97th Street Greenmarket. But that kind of stuff costs real money, and is kinda boring, so I’m usually drawn to his little bin of whole fish. I’ve bought lots of excellent porgies from him, and the week before I had gone for the butterfish. This time the weirdest thing in the bin was the sea robin, so I bought it. For $5.

I asked Rick what to do with the thing. He said to cut off the tail and bake it. So I cut off the tail:

I then followed a recipe for monkfish tail in the no-longer-All-New Joy of Cooking (1997 edition), stuffing the thing with chopped garlic and basil and Maldon salt:

I roasted it at 450 degrees, initially just with oil and then with some Vinho Verde thrown in.

It was a bust, which is why I took no pictures of the finished product. It didn’t look good. It didn’t taste good. The kid, who will eat porgies all day, didn’t like it. The wife didn’t like it. I didn’t like it. The mix of flavors was just wrong. Maybe I overcooked it. Or undercooked it. But I don’t think that was the problem. Luckily, I had also made a nice salad and cooked up some couscous and Fresh Direct lamb sausage. But still, it was a bust.

I think the fish might taste fine in a thick, creamy sauce. A sea robin etouffee. Except that it’s got lots of little bones which would make such treatment difficult. So this week it’s back to porgies or butterfish. Or maybe even tuna.