My wife D asked me the other day to buy four chicken marylands for some soup she was making. I was off to the market where there are several poultry shops and saw some lovely corn fed marylands in one of the counters. They are a lot more expensive than regular chicken and for what D wanted, unnecessary. At the next chicken shop, they had a tray of marylands which were quite large, two would have been enough, but if I was wrong I would have caught it, so purchased four of them, better too much than too little. When I got home D said that two would have been enough and so the excess marylands were consigned to the fridge.

A couple of days later, I was home early from work and D looked at me and said, "You can cook dinner," as she had other things she was doing, like the washing. "Fair trade," I thought silently to myself. We had decided this week not to buy any meat as the freezer was groaning full, but there was nothing defrosted to cook, so a quick look in the fridge revealed the marylands, but how to have them? On another shelf was some okra, one of my favourite vegetables.

I came to know and love okra in my first marriage. They were not readily available fresh at that time and we purchased them dried from specialty stores, they were also available tinned, and had the rather charming name of ladies fingers. We cooked often with them and the ones we preferred to use were very small, which were considered the best. The flavour is not dissimilar to green capsicum, but one of the properties of okra, which was not so apparent in the dried version, is it's ability to thicken a sauce via a mucilaginous liquid* stored in the pod, which is the unripe seed pod of a plant that we use as a vegetable. This clear, gooey and sticky liquid has enough thickening power to make flour unnecessary as a thickening agent.

Chicken with Okra

2 large chicken marylands
4 tablespoons oil
2 onions, diced
2 carrots, diced
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 small chile, finely diced
1 800 g (2 lb) tin crushed tomatoes
200 g (1/2 lb) okra
200 g (1/2 lb) cauliflower
salt & fresh ground pepper

separate the marylands into thighs and drumsticks, if you like you can cut them into smaller pieces and brown them in the oil. Remove and brown the onions and carrots, then add the garlic, chile, crushed tomatoes and the browned chicken pieces, bring to the boil and simmer for 30 minutes. Remove the stem from the okra and cut into short pieces, cut the cauliflower into small florets and add the okra and cauliflower to the pot and season. Continue to simmer for 15 minutes or until the vegetables are soft and the sauce thickened. Serve with plain rice.

* I wanted to say this liquid looks like clear snot, but that would never do in a cooking blog, would it?