Okra

One plant that never seems to have a problem in my garden is okra.  If it's too wet, the okra thrives; if it's dry as the Sahara, the okra flourishes.  It seems to have no natural enemies:  bugs leave it alone, and it doesn't have any form of blight or pestilence that kills it, like so many of my favorite garden vegetables do.  
It's easy to freeze, no mess, no fuss:  Just slice it and put it in a freezer bag, and it's ready to be used in winter soups and stews.  
The trouble is that there's only so much you can do with okra, so far as I know:  fry it or use it in soups and stews.  Oh yes, and okra and tomatoes.  Which to me is just chicken gumbo without the chicken.  
Cliff and I absolutely love southern-fried okra, and we've had far more than we should have had this year.  The granddaughters spent this past weekend with us and I fixed fried okra for them twice in two days' time.    They would have eaten more, had I offered.   
As I type this, the low-fat, healthy version of chicken gumbo is simmering on the stove, so dinner will be ready whenever we're ready to eat, which will probably be shortly after 10 o'clock when Cliff gets out of bed.   
I enjoy cooking, baking, and trying new foods.  All I require of a recipe is that the ingredients can be found in a normal grocery store and that it doesn't require my purchasing a special bowl, pot, or pan in order to make it.  


I've made baking powder biscuits ever since I took Home Economics that one year, and I've never had any complaints.  I've tasted better biscuits, though.  The better ones were always made by ladies raised in the south; and in the back of my mind I couldn't help wondering what a person could do to improve a recipe that's so simple and basic.  What could you change to get that subtle difference?  
Now don't tell me to go buy those frozen biscuits; yes, they are as good as home-made.  But where's the fun in that?  
The book I'm reading aloud in the car as we travel, The Bridge, takes place in the south and has as one of its main characters an elderly woman who makes biscuits often.  For some reason, this stirred up in me, once more, the desire to improve my already-pretty-darned-good biscuits.  
I don't watch cooking shows; I haven't since the Frugal Gourmet turned out to be a molester of little boys.  My son has one TV cook he likes, though, and mentions often... the guy on "Good Eats".   
Well, I thought, if he's good enough for my son, he's good enough for me.  So I googled up his recipe for biscuits, only to find it's pretty much like the recipe I've used all my life.  Beneath that recipe, though, was this comment from his grandmother: 

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  Advice courtesy Mae Skelton
  I don't have much use for recipes but the one you get on a bag of White Lily self-rising flour is hard to beat. And it's a lot easier than the one my crazy grandson dreamed up.  

So I finally found the two secret ingredients:  self-rising flour and buttermilk.  Cliff and I don't have biscuits often, but from now on when we do, they will be the biscuits I've always wanted to be able to make.   

How's this for a rambling post?

Southern fried okra

Taken today, in front of my okra plants. I cropped the bottom of the picture out so you wouldn't see my weeds. Seriously!

We love fried okra, cooked the way my mom taught me: Slice the okra, dip in egg, then roll in a mixture of half flour, half corn meal. I could never understand, though, why all the coating doesn't stay on the little wheels of okra. When we eat out and fried okra is served, it's got crispy coating all around it. What was I doing wrong? So I went searching on Google and found a recipe that lets the coating stay on the okra. The only differences between this and my old method are the addition of baking powder and the instructions to leave the okra in the egg/milk mixture for at least ten minutes. So I don't know which factor made the difference, but I've followed this recipe twice, and it worked, both times.

Southern Fried Okra

1 pound fresh okra

2 eggs, beaten

1/4 cup buttermilk

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 cup cornmeal

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

Freshly ground pepper to taste

Vegetable oil

1. Wash and slice okra; pat dry with paper towels.
2. Combine eggs and buttermilk; add okra, and let stand for 10 minutes.
3. Combine flour, cornmeal, baking powder, salt and pepper.
4. Drain okra, small portions at a time, using a slotted spoon.
5. Dredge okra, small portions at a time, in flour mixture.
6. Pour oil to depth of 2 to 3-inches in a Dutch oven of deep-fat fryer and heat to 375*F (190*C). Fry okra until golden brown. Drain on paper towels and serve immediately.

I don't use buttermilk, by the way; I use plain milk. And I use a skillet rather than a deep fryer, but with plenty of oil. And I like to add some Cajun seasoning to the flour/cornmeal mix.

I found this on cooksrecipe.com.