#42: Okra Pickle Martini
Gooey seeds, rest, and moving right along
Well, well, well! Hello from me and my languishing flu shot arm as I reflect on sipping a martini, up, with an okra pickle. As an antidote to Zoom fatigue, I’ve taken to making a beverage and calling friends the normal not-video way, and I’m definitely not the only one. When I recently fumbled and accidentally pressed the “FaceTime” button on the phone with my friend Lanie she politely declined and asked me sternly, as if both rhetorical and genuinely curious, “Why would you do that?”
Why would you put okra in a martini, you ask. Ah, yes, but why not? For a moment, I wanted to anoint it the Mississippi Martini, merely because I live there now, the state lines within which I purchased the jar of okra pickles. But okra is not a Mississippian thing alone by any means. In fact, the pickle brand “Talk-O-Texas” is, you guessed it, from Texas. I did a quick Google search and it turns out Mississippi does have its own state martini of sorts: the “Mississippi Mud Pie Martini” or “Mudtini” courtesy of the genuinely harrowing “Mantitlement dot com,” an actual website. But I digress.
When I have just one more sip left of any martini, I love to chomp into the foreign object (olive, pickle, whatever) before taking the final sip. The okra pickle is deliciously textured in a way that even a pickle spear isn’t, probably because the outer peel is faintly fuzzy like a peach. Once punctured or bitten into, the seeds fall out somehow both slippery and crunchy. The slip sliminess is what okra is known for and not always fondly. Its story reaches farther and wider than just the question of where and how it was introduced to this continent. I really recommend reading Jessica B. Harris on its origins and how it has taken on meaning along the way. She writes,
“The distaste for okra is all about the sticky substance that the vegetable exudes the more it’s cut. The more it’s cut; the more it’s sticky. Some dishes in Brazil and on the African continent make a point of releasing as much of the ooze as possible resulting in thick glue-like sheets of almost elastic consistency. In Louisiana folks understand that the beauty of okra is in the thing that is most decried by the unknowing… in its “slime.” The prodigious thickening properties of the vegetable mean that it can take a thin watery soup and transform it into a substantial one.
While I’ve always loved okra fried (ideally from K&W Cafeteria) I’m partial to its pickled form at present. With the last slurp of martini, it is vinegary and crunchy but ultimately soft and tender. With gin on the throat in all its herbal warmth, it’s like if a beverage had the balance of the world’s most perfect salad. The quarantine martini (could it be that which is on the new New Yorker cover?) is perfect for sipping and trying to socialize virtually, but also for turning off the video and ringing someone old school.
martini up with an okra pickle
2 oz gin
1 oz dry vermouth
pour gin and vermouth over ice in a mixing tumbler (or any handy container) and stir. strain into a chilled glass, the shallower the better. add an okra pickle, and enjoy.*
*the okra pickle would also be VERY good in a bloody mary, virgin or not. i am not a mixologist by any means, but i do like martinis and pickles and complimentary moody tunes:
You may have noticed that Weekday Warriors has a new look! Just in time for year’s end! It is all thanks to good fellow Edgar Caswell who took a few kernels of ideas and nuggets of newsletters-past and ran with it gloriously. When we were coworkers at Heath Ceramics in the Before Times, we took great delight in The Smudge, a zany print newspaper that contains everything from puzzles and essays on the architecture of coziness to fun illustrations and weird anon Classifieds. Betwixt and between meetings and coffee runs, we bonded over the possibility of someday collaborating creatively. It was so fun to explore ideas back and forth, and it feels good to have some life in the newsletter again by way of a jaunty banner logo. I love the seventies feel, with a little bit of spice. Thank you Edgar! Throw him a follow on Instagram if you fancy :)
I started Weekday Warriors in 2018 with this idea that weekdays are incontrovertibly stressful and difficult, but that we might make it to the weekend for true Saturday-Sunday’s rest through cheeky recipes and mildly informative email missives. But plenty of brands have achieved that, and nothing has changed. Now, in early December of 2020, I feel differently. 100 percent capital R Rest really isn’t the end goal, not really. A week’s cycle is arbitrary, anyhow.
When Dolly Parton wrote 9 to 5, she wrote about the disillusionment of “waiting for the day your ship'll come in.” I think she was getting at something about how we have so poorly framed rest and achievement not as a cycle, but an arrival. Dolly was saying something really radical about how we’re not alone in this 9-to-5 pickle, nor should we be. She also talks about dreams (“You have dreams he’ll never take away”) and I’ve been thinking about how it’s certainly not a coincidence that “dreams” in a more traditional sense come to us as we sleep—the ultimate, absolutely vital form of rest, and also a cycle—just as the federal minimum wage is not a living wage, making humane working hours for many impossible. The new Weekday Warriors suggests that it’s radical to rest when your sweet bones need it, dream during the day, and find new creative ways you can personally advocate for everyone to be able to do that.
I suppose what I’m saying is to be a weekday warrior in 2020 and beyond is a 24/7 thing, and it can mean that generative rest takes lots of forms. I’m interested in how we might help each other along, be it through redistribution of money and belongings, gifting of plant cuttings, or simply sitting in stillness. Going forward in this newsletter, though, I am interested in how we dream while we’re awake, through spaces in which food, recipes, identity, and imagination comingle. Whether it’s watching slow TV of someone chopping vegetables on YouTube or finally getting enough iron nuggets on Animal Crossing to make a tiny virtual cast iron skillet, these are some of the small rests throughout the day that keep us charged up.
Not every newsletter will be this long. In fact, most of them will be shorter (don’t worry, there will still be recipes and playlists!) but I will share at least one longform essay each month about an impressionable food scene in a movie or television show and how one might recreate it. I hope this newsletter will continue to feel exciting, inspiring, and provoking. I am also opening up contributions for the “piece of power” on a rolling basis. Submit anytime!
piece of power
virtual cookie swap, “new rules, same old us.” email your favorite cookie recipe to meredith by tomorrow, and reap the benefits (she is a fabulous baker and no doubt her extended network has the cookie content we need).
Vodka not gin :)