I should leave the cooking to Jason...

Generally when I actually have a day off when I'm not behind on work, not trying to run 100 errands, and not feeling guilty about not cleaning my house, I tend to wake up thinking I'm Martha Stewart.  OCCASIONALLY these days are great and I end up accomplishing something.  More often, I end up at least learning lessons, if nothing else.  Today was one of those lesson-learning days. 

I don't cook.  Well, VERY rarely.  Today I was determined to make fried okra from the pods God and I grew in my garden.  I braved the sweltering sauna outside, grabbed by trusty Felco nippers, and picked every available pod.  Also grabbed a couple of banana peppers and some super-sweet cherry tomatoes, two of which didn't make it inside because I had to perform a quality control taste check. 

I was feeling very earth-hippy-gardeny in my (very unflattering but awesome) hippy-dippy long flowy cotton dress, so I gathered my harvest in the skirt of the dress ala little house on the prarie. Thus, my first challenge once I got inside was to pick off all the schnauzer hair that stuck to the okra from the fabric of the dress. (me and my "non-shedding" schnauzers...Oy-Vey!)

But I got through that challenge, washed the okra, chopped the okra, learned that I need to cut it from the bush earlier so it doesn't get so tough.  Luckily it's spineless, whatever that means, so I didn't have to deal with that.  And glory be!  I actually had cornmeal in the pantry!  Who knew!  And look at that!  CRISCO! Why do I even have that?  Oh well, it's like the pantry fairy was with me when I read those instructions on the interwebs last night and made sure I had the ingredients. 

And then I paused.....how does one actually make the cornmeal stick to the okra?  Milk?  No - that's for chicken in flour I think.  I could go look it up on the computer, but that would involve walking ALL THE WAY from the kitchen to my office (about 30 feet).  So, I just rewet the okra with water, put the cornmeal on it, and stirred it up. 

Melted the crisco in the cast-iron skillet, put the okra in there and.....wait.  Where'd the crisco go?  It completely disappeared.  Interesting.  So I put a little more.  After awhile, it began to actually LOOK sort-of like fried okra is supposed to look:

And so I made sure one of the little pieces was super crispy and brown to taste. I'm having visions, at this point, of sitting at my mamaw's farmhouse table (which is currently in my dining room) as a little girl, not being able to get enough of her fried okra (which I'm sure was fried in bacon grease) and little biscuits with fig preserves.  I'm feeling homey and productive and then I take a taste....

BBBBBBBBBBBLLLLLLLLLLLLEEEEEEEEEEECCCCCCCCCCCHHHHHHHH!!!

I then I fell over dead.  Something was very, very wrong.  Maybe the crisco?  Can crisco go bad?  It's not animal fat, so surely not, right?  Well....

huh! How about that!  Who knew?  That must be what it was, because SURELY corn meal can't go bad, right?  I mean...it's corn meal. It's like...corny styrofoam.  Well....

Yeah that's right.  It says BEST BY 13 MAY 05.  That' PRE-KATRINA.  I told y'all I didn't cook very often. On that note, I'm going to make tacos.  I hope I can do that without poisoning anybody...