According to a document posted on the internet, okra is a vegetable with seemingly magical properties being beneficial to heart, liver, lungs, stomach, spleen, bladder, bowels, joints and anything else anatomical you care to mention. The reason for looking at this amazing testimonial was because okra was served up at dinner a couple of evenings ago and I took one mouthful, in fact hardly a mouthful, and that was it. I have never taken to this vegetable; it’s not only the flavour I dislike but the texture of it as well. However I suppose in view of what we have learnt I had better get used to eating it. Needless to say the others at the table walloped into them with evident relish.
Food fads – I guess we all have them and I have evidently never liked the foods that are supposedly good for one though I am getting around to it. I have at last come around to eating that tasteless rabbit food known as lettuce. I can take it with a dressing of oil and lemon or with apple and walnuts and a drizzle of honey. That is very good. Tomatoes I’m gradually taking a liking to, at least the firm fleshy bits beneath the skin. I still hate the soggy pips. Living in Greece where tomatoes and cucumbers are consumed in great numbers it’s probably just as well I’ve got around to the tomatoes at least though I still cannot take that other tasteless vegetable the cucumber except in dainty sandwiches with cream cheese. I remember the children of our Cypriot neighbour in London walking around their garden eating cucumbers the way normal people eat apples. The other Greek food I cannot take is xorta. Xorta simply means weeds so to make the idea of eating weeds more palatable, restaurants place them on the menu as ‘mountain greens’! What we call weeds in English are called wild weeds in Greek, agrioxorta. There is any number of varieties of xorta and they are reputed, like okra, to be a very healthy food, but for my taste they are either bitter or too allied to spinach.
Currently it is the water melon season. Everywhere you look there are gigantic water melons, on trucks, in stores and on restaurant tables as the freebee with raki after a meal. Now I never used to like water melon. Like tomato pips I always found it too wishy washy (logical I suppose as its name implies) but this year they are so fleshy and sweet I’ve really taken to them for the first time. And food fads chance over the years of course. As a kid I detested mushrooms, now I love them, I couldn’t abide olives, now I adore them. There are of course things I still don’t want to eat, like okra, but I guess I’ll have to force myself with that one. Maybe I will get used to it and change my mind as my aging body gets healthier and healthier. Tee-hee!