Drying Okra

People in our village are busy harvesting and processing various crops, including okra. This is one of the most often-used ingredients in the "kadang" (sauce) eaten with the main food staple. Okra is highly valued for its slimy-ness, and it also serves to thicken the sauce.

This photo shows how okra is grown. Each piece of the vegetable forms upright on the end of a stalk.

Much okra is consumed fresh, but if the harvest is good (as it is this year), women also dry it to be used in future months. The okra is cut up and put out to dry on pieces of plastic or tarp; or if these are not available, they put it directly on the ground, on a hard surface that they make by putting water on the sand, smoothing it out and leaving it to dry--this helps reduce the amount of sand in the final product.

Freshly cut pieces of okra.




Once the okra is dry, it is pounded into a powder, which mixes well into sauces.

Photo below: Okra in various stages of dehydration; the driest pieces are on the top left.

Sorghum Splendour

Walking among the sorghum fields here reminds me of the song "Oh What a Beautiful Morning" from the musical Oklahoma!, where it says "the corn is as high as an elephant's eye, and it looks like it's growing way up to the sky!"

We don't have leaves changing colour this time of year but we do have some fall colours--the ripening heads of sorghum:

People cut some of the best of the first ripe heads of sorghum and tie them up to dry in their compound, high in a tree or on a post. They will be used for seeds next year.