Sweet Potato and Okra Curry

It was only a matter of time before I started posting recipes.


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One largeish onion - diced
A couple of cloves garlic - diced
One tin of tomatoes
A teaspoonful of garam masala
A teaspoonful of ground tumeric

One large sweet potato / kumara - diced
A handful of okra - topped and tailed

Plain yoghurt to accompany the meal (or you can chop some chives into it, like I did)

I used elephant garlic from the Isle of Wight's Garlic Farm. Elephant Garlic is enormous! It is much milder in flavour than usual garlic and is fabulous roasted (but it takes an awfully long time). It is a lot more liquid than usual garlic and seems to have a somewhat bitter aftertaste. This is not a problem when roasting, but it does seem to be a problem when saute-ing. I don't usually mind bitter flavours, but because I used about half a head of garlic, the bitterness was overpowering the other flavours. I dealt with it by adding some palm sugar to take the bitter taste away.

Saute the onions, and when softened and translucent, add the garlic. Throw in the garam masala and tumeric and fry into a nice paste. To prevent burning of the spices, you can add a little bit of water to the mix.

Add the tin of tomatoes and stir into the spice/onion/garlic paste so that the colour becomes consistent. I love this part: I find thoroughly enjoyable watching the colours merge, and the consistency of both sets of ingredient change to something altogether different.



Once the tomatoes and paste have unified, throw in the diced sweet potato. Cook without a lid so that the sauce reduces, but if it's getting too dry, add a little water and perhaps put a lid on, so that the sweet potato cooks through. I like mine still a little bit crunchy.

Towards the end of cooking, add the okra. Put the lid on to cook the okra - it's cooked when it changes from dull green to bright green.

Serve with rice, accompanying yoghurt and, if you're me, soy sauce. I eat soy sauce with almost everything.