sausage and okra casserole with rice

Every week the Rural Studio provides us with a communal meal generally followed by a lecture or other event, at which everyone ritually complains about the quality of the food. Although I would never claim that it had any great culinary merits, the food that is cooked up by a local woman is rarely truly inedible and I do find the complaints about it slightly unjustified. It's filling, home-cooked and free and to my omnivorous mouth this makes it perfectly acceptable, especially compared to the institutional food I used to get in England (hall food at college, school dinners) which was wholly disgusting in every way, and generally totally processed.



Given my food-related scruples I do find it strange that on this one I'm one of the only people who quite happily fills my plate and scoffs it down. The only thing I can't manage is the horrible American 'salad' that generally also gets served - iceberg lettuce, those weird pre-peeled carrots that look like orange bullets, watery tomato and the worst horror of all, topped with grated 'Cheddar' cheese. The first couple of times I tried to pick out a few bits of lettuce and tomato from the bottom, uncontaminated by the cheese, but this was never wholly successful and now I just resign myself to a lack of vitamins at this particular meal each week.