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Sorry for the posting lull, I’ve been on a bit of a knitting binge. A few weeks ago I purchased Weekend Knitting and recently began working on two projects from the book: legwarmers and a felted bag.

If you are thinking about buying Weekend Knitting, I would highly recommend it. The patterns are easy, fun, and a little unusual. I especially like the chair cushions and the argyle slippers. You can read a book review at Knitter’s Review.

I just started the felted bag. The bottom panel of the bag is in the above pic; the yarn is Classic Elite Montera. I can’t wait to finish it; I think it is going to be lovely.

I’ve also started on the legwarmers using some some Lion Wool Prints yarn that I got on sale in Durham at Walmart (!) for under $3 a skein. When knit the wool creates that funky 80s sweater pattern, which I don’t especially like in sweaters, but I kind of like in a legwarmer. Some of the pleasant oddness that comes with wearing retro fashion without feeling like I got stuck in a timewarp : ). The legwarmers are fulled slightly after knitting to give them a little bit of a fuzzy look.

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In celebration of the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., I ( if you are reading this from outside the U.S., today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day), I am posting a video essay on King that Cynthia made and posted on youtube. I really like it and I hope you do too. The song is “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)” by Marvin Gaye.

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The other day I was shopping at the local Shaws (a New England supermarket chain) and was shocked that there was no fresh okra in the produce section. After a few minutes of running up and down the aisles, I found some canned okra in the ethnic foods section next to an assortment of goods from Sylvia’s Restaurant. There was only one type of canned okra, the one in the above picture, canned by the Allen Canning Company of Arkansas.

As I was paying for my canned okra, I started wondering, “what kind of ethnic food is okra?” I mean, I always thought of okra as a regional food, since okra is an extremely popular veggie in the South, but I never thought of it as somehow ethnic (that word is beginning to lose its meaning from over use…have you noticed that? ) until I tried to find it in a New England supermarket. It is true that okra arrived in the Americas from Africa either with African slaves (the most plausible explanation) or with French colonists. And okra is a staple in African cookery (it still grows wild in Egypt and Ethiopia). Okra is also an important veggie in Indian dishes, such as Bhindi Curry, where okra (ladies fingers) is a main ingredient. Standing in the ethnic foods section with a can of okra in my hands, the South felt like it could have been another country, Italy or Japan, whose cuisine I might sample, but whose great cities, Rome or Tokyo, I might never see.

When I got home from the store, I made some vegetarian groundnut stew. Then I started collecting okra recipes. Here are a few: from Field to Feast, Okra with Coconut; from My Cookbook, Vendakkai/Okra Fry; from What we’re Eating, Southern Fushion Sushi ; from Happy Burp, Dum Bhindi (Okra marinated in Yogurt); from Crazy Aunt Purl, Fried Okra; and from Trembom in English, Chicken with Okra.

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