I have told y’all before that bacon is an essential part of any self-respecting Texas gal’s diet. Bacon is yummy. It can make darn near anything taste good. And, for us bacon lovers, there are all sorts of other products associated with bacon that we can acquire. So, here are:

THIRTEEN THINGS I LOVE ABOUT BACON
1. Just plain bacon! Can’t you just smell the aroma of that Applewood Bacon? Do you hear it sizzling in the pan? That’s a sweeter sound than angels singing!

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2. A bacon wallet…for when I bring home the bacon (only $7.95 at Perpetual Kid)…someday I’ll bring home the bacon!

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3. A B.L.O.T.!! Bacon, lettuce, onion & tomato sandwich! Add chips and a beer and you have all the major food groups.

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4. Gummi Bacon strips…OK, they taste like strawberry, but they are good for a conversation starter—or gross out. Get ‘em at Archie McPhee

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3. Bacon & okra

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4. Bacon strip bandages…they make me want an ouchie. Sprout has ‘em for $4.65.

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5. Bacon & eggs…mmmm…cholesterol!

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6. Bacon & egg bandages…again from Sprout (I love this place!)

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7. Filet mignon (with bacon!). Throw away the beef, all you need is bacon.

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8. Bacon air freshener. C’mon you know you want it. It’s from Gagworks (Does it make you want to? Gag, that is?)

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9. Bacon grease! No Southern kitchen is complete without a jar of this. I even wrote an essay about it, because I love it so much. You can fry just nearly anything in it—it especially makes tofu more palatable.

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10. As if air freshener weren’t enough, there are BLT candles, which are described as “sensual, sexy and tantalizing” by Grateful Palate. Even I don’t believe that.

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11. Bacon flavored toothpicks. All of us Southerners must have toothpicks dangling from our grins. They may as well taste good. Again from Archie McPhee.

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12. Kyra Sedgwick of The Closer (my favorite televisions show)

WHO (BECAUSE SHE IS MARRIED TO HIM) IS ONLY ONE DEGREE FROM:

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13. KEVIN BACON!

Now, didn’t I tell you that bacon is yummy?

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It’s not the season for okra. Buying vegetables in season has never been anything that mattered to me. I love okra any time I can get it. I crave it fried. However, I also enjoy it pickled or in a gumbo or a stew. But, don’t give me “snotty okra.” I don’t want it boiled all by itself. Okra when it is boiled gets mucilaginous (snotty) and it isn’t very appetizing to me.

For some reason, okra seems to be a Southern Regional dish. I guess because it grows in hot weather. Okra is said to have originated in Africa. Some people say it came to the United States in the 1700s with the French colonists in Louisiana. Others say that African slaves brought the seeds with them. Friends from the North don’t seem to know what okra is. I like to serve it to them to watch their reactions.

Several years ago, a neighbor of mine dropped by on a day that I was frying okra I had grown in my garden. I offered her a taste and her eyes rolled back in her head with ecstasy. She borrowed a bowl and took some fried okra home to her family. All summer, if she heard I was frying okra, she would come tapping at my door with a bowl in her hand.

The next summer, she planted okra in her own garden and waited excitedly for her first crop. One day, I told her I had fried my first batch of okra from my summer produce. She got a stricken look on her face and moaned, “Mine isn’t ready yet!”

I stepped in her garden to take a look. There were okra pods as long as my forearm on her plants. I said, “What are you talking about, gal? You’ve left these on the plant so long that they’ve turned into swords! You could kill somebody with those. You have to cut the okra when they are short and tender.”

“Oh,” she replied. “I thought they weren’t ready yet, because the skin hadn’t turned black.”

Bless her heart. All she knew about okra is the kind you find in the store. It sits on the shelf and gets old and turns black. Good tender okra is bright green and short. If you have never raised it in your garden, and didn’t grow up eating it, you might not know that either. Don’t be ashamed about that.

And, don’t think that if you have eaten fried okra at a restaurant that you have really had fried okra. Most Southern cooks don’t batter the okra. Usually it’s mixed with cornmeal and fried in grease. My brother and I both contend that it has to be fried until it’s burned on the edges.

Because I cook like my Mamaw (you don’t measure, you just put in a handful of this and a pinch of that until it “looks and tastes right”), I had to prepare a batch of okra, then take it apart and measure it, so that I could tell you how to cook it. I have done painstaking research for you, and will be ashamed of you if you don’t go fry some okra today. If you are a vegetarian, you will have to figure out your own recipe. I can’t help you.

FRIED OKRA

You will need:
2 ½ cups of okra, sliced. Cut off the knob on the stem end and the tip before slicing. They are edible, but they aren’t pretty and the stem end is tough.
2 Tablespoons of cornmeal
1 Tablespoon of flour
4 Tablespoons of diced onion
Salt and pepper to taste (I can’t put in enough pepper)
Mix all of that together in a bowl until the okra is coated with the meal and flour.

Drag out that cast iron skillet. I told you how to season it properly just a few days ago. You don’t technically have to use a cast iron skillet, but the okra will taste better if you do.

Pre-heat the pan for a few seconds, then fry 7-8 strips of good fatty bacon (the Good Lord gave us bacon grease, and we are supposed to use it). Once the bacon is done, take it out of the pan and drain it, then crumble it.

Tumble the okra mixture slowly into the hot bacon grease and stir the okra until it is all coated with grease. If it doesn’t all get coated, you don’t have enough grease. This part is a science that is difficult to explain. You don’t want it too greasy (if there is such a thing) but you can’t fry it if it is dry. You might have to add a touch of grease or oil. It really depends on the bacon.

Fry the okra on medium heat, stirring frequently, until the meal turns brown. Then, cook it a little longer. Again, my brother and I think it tastes best slightly burned. But, you might not want to try that the first time. When you consider it done (which may take 15 minutes), take it out of the pan and serve it with the crumbled bacon on top.

This will serve four people as a side dish…or one person like me.

There are some days that I enjoy cooking. I savor the smells and the textures of the food. I love the aroma of onion as I chop it, even though I am not fond of the tears. A whiff of fresh garlic makes my mouth water. I can never chop bell pepper or potatoes without taking a bite of their sweet flavor.

Though I try hard to resist it, sometimes my roots just come to the surface. You see, the women in my family had a “secret ingredient” to make anything taste wonderful: bacon grease. Growing up, I thought that bacon grease was the fifth major food group.

My Mamaw and my mother both kept Folger’s Coffee cans filled with drippings on the back of the stove. Instead of butter or olive oil, bacon grease was used to sauté everything. No, it probably wasn’t healthy to fry food in it (though my grandparents ate it every day of their lives and they were older than dirt when they died). But I guarantee that the taste of anything cooked in bacon grease sends your taste buds to Heaven. Bacon grease was, in those days, “nectar of the Gods.”

They say, in my family, that once my Mamaw wanted to bake a cake and didn’t have any butter. She used bacon grease instead and no one noticed the difference! I think that was a joke, but you can never be sure.

I don’t keep a coffee can of grease. The guilt of throwing away perfectly good bacon grease is almost too much to bear, but I try to cook in a more healthy way. I use olive oil most of the time.

Still, the sound of bacon sizzling in the pan is music to my ears. The smell of applewood smoked bacon sends me into a paroxysm of joy. And, I simply would never dream of frying okra in any pedestrian oil. It must be fried in bacon grease. Anything else is a travesty.

Take a moment to stop and remember. I know that everyone is busy, but don’t let the memories get lost in this technological world we inhabit.

Bacon grease may not have been revered in your home. What foods were on your table? Think about the sights and sounds and smells of the kitchen when you were growing up. The kitchen was the “Heart of the Home” long ago (now it’s the television or the computer). What was your favorite food? Who cooked it?
If you think about it, you can almost taste it.