Today's tomato pickin' yielded 4 pints of canned tomatoes. I expect that will be the last time this year that I'll pick enough to fool with canning.
Once the tomatoes were in the canner, I set a timer and told The Husband, "When the timer goes off, turn the burner off," and I put on my mud boots and went back to the garden to pick the purple hull peas. I've already shelled, blanched, and frozen them. One fat quart bag.
There are tiny white flies on the peas. I wonder if they are responsible for all of the skinny, moldy, matchstick-sized pods that I pulled off and discarded. I wanted to spray them, but didn't have any insecticide mixed up in the sprayer. It was getting dark, and I still needed to cut the okra. I ended up with several big hand-fulls of okra that wasn't too big. I briefly considered bringing it home to pickle or freeze, but there were peas to shell and put up, so I ended up pawning the okra off on Nanny. There'll be more.
Speaking of okra, I finally got around to making okra and tomatoes. As far as I know, I'd never eaten home-made okra & tomatoes, only the canned stuff, years ago, before I married. I liked it okay. It always surprised me that the okra wasn't slimy. I half-expected my home-made dish to be a little slippery, but it wasn't. (Maybe the acid in the tomatoes dissolves the slime.) I basically followed the recipe I saw in a Paula Deen video. Sautee some onions (I threw in two small pimiento peppers, just because I had them) in bacon grease. When the onions get translucent, add the chopped tomatoes. Paula used canned tomatoes; I used fresh ones. Paula added a spoon-full of schmaltz, or something close to it, to the tomatoes; I used a spoon-full of chicken fat off some chicken stock I'd saved yesterday after roasting a chicken. I seasoned the tomatoes with salt, pepper, and maybe a tablespoon of sugar. Once the tomatoes had cooked a little bit, I threw in the okra and cooked it until the okra was tender, but not soft. It would have been perfect if we'd eaten it then, but the other things I was cooking weren't ready, so I turned off the burner and the residual heat cooked the okra just a little more than I would've liked. But it was still good. Paula Deen says she serves it with rice, but I had squash that needed to be used, so I didn't make rice this time
As I watched the stuff cook, I was tempted to thicken it with a little flour or cornstarch slurry, but didn't. The next time I make it - which probably won't be long (we liked it) - I might sprinkle a tablespoon or two of flour over the onions as they cook, which would make a little bit of a roux to thicken the tomato juice - make the sauce a little more like gravy - and serve it over rice.
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