Jackson Jambalaya

Ah the good old days!

It's hard to believe you guys have put up with me for so long, but of you have looked at most of my 80+ weekly posts, you already know I am very fond of "meat and two" or "meat and three" meals. Regardless, I have nothing against vegetarians, as long as they aren't militant about everyone following a culinary lifestyle limited to vegetables over quinoa, with tofu gravy. Hopefully you guys don't swell up like a frog when you remember mom saying "Eat your vegetables. They are good for you."

You know I am a southerner and that most southerners love vegetables. Like many of you, I grew up on them, with most of what we ate coming from an almost two-acre (that's big!) garden in a field behind our house on the west side of Clinton. Mom and dad planted it each spring and expected us kids to help hoe weeds, dig, pick, and shell. Some summers, we shelled so many peas I thought my fingernails would stay "purple hull pea shell purple" forever. Our garden usually consisted of butter beans, purple hull peas, lady peas (dad's favorite and I love them too), texas cream peas (almost as good as lady peas, and a lot more productive), Merit sweet corn, green beans, sweet potatoes, yellow crook-neck squash, tomatoes, lots of okra, cucumbers, and sometimes one or two bell peppers, banana peppers, long green hot peppers, and eggplants, just because. Sometimes dad would let us plant watermelons at the far end of the 10 (150 feet long) rows we planted, but they never made as well as the rattle snake melons and cantaloupes we could get at the farmer's market. Eventually red potatoes were added in a small plotm in late winter, for spring harvest. Mom and dad weren't really onion growers, so they bought those at A&P or Jitney Jungle. Oh, my dad always planted peanuts, too because he loved them boiled.

They got gardening from their depression era parents.

Here is the kind of meal you can do almost every night if your garden is coming in. For those who don't like to play in the dirt, you can get all of these ingredients at the Farmer's Market parallel to the Woodrow Wilson bridge over the railroad yard, or the newer one, Jim Buck built, northwest of the fairground on High Street. Also, you will find stuff at Freshway Produce on Old Canton Road, Donna's produce on 49 S. and the other roadside produce stands you may shop at. Clinton has a Tuesday night downtown event during the summer that has produce vendors too. Of course, you can get most of this in the produce section and frozen food case at Wally World, Kroger, Piggly Wiggly, or your local grocer. The grocery store stuff is not quite as good as country garden veggies, but many produce stands and a few of the farmers market folks sell stuff that comes straight from the produce wholesaler too. My thought is, the more pristine the produce on display looks, the more likely it is that a local farmer did not grow it. They get really upset if you walk the bins taste testing the tomatoes and peaches, so you might want to rely on your visual evaluation.

Let me get away from this drivel and do this week's recipe post. I'll just call this week's post: 

Heaven on a plate - Vegetable Dinner - Purple Hull Peas with okra pods, skillet fried okra, tomatoes, and cornbread.

Need:

Purple hull peas, we blanch and freeze our own, we get them big pre-shelled bags at Freshway (and they get more expensive every year)

Okra pods, small whole pods, less than four inches in length for boiling with the peas and larger pods, cut up into 3/4 inch pieces for fried.

Tomatoes – your favorite variety. Mom loved Marion, which is a smaller fruit, about the size of a tennis ball, but we also grew Big Boy and Better Boy. The old heirloom tomatoes are popular now, but you never saw them back then. Garden grown tomatoes are the best tasting, but rare as hen's teeth at produce stands.

Buttered Cornbread (white cornbread), following my depression cornbread recipe.

Some diced onion

Directions:

Peel and slice the tomatoes (lots of them). If I have any cucumbers, I will do them, also. I like them chilled, so into the fridge they go until dinner is served. 

Prep the okra by washing it, then trimming away the toughest part of the top stem, which is too tough to eat. A good cook can remove this top stem part and leave a tiny bit of the very bottom on the pod to keep the stem end sealed. It cooks better that way. They sell frozen whole (small) pod okra at most grocers if you don't have fresh.

For the fried okra, cooked “scrambled or loose” like mom did hers, cut the (tender) pods into 3/4 inch pieces. If a sharp knife shows resistance when you cut, the okra is too tough. When I buy my okra at Freshway produce or the grocer, I try to only buy pods that are 4 - 5 inches long or less, since these are seldom tough. Most grocers sell bags of cut okra in the frozen food section and these fry up nicely/ Good in gumbo and soup too.

Cook the purple hull peas, in a boiler, with enough water to cover the (frozen) peas (or fresh if you are lucky enough to have some). The ones here were from our freezer. Add a Tablespoon vegetable oil, or bacon grease, ½ teaspoon sugar and 1 teaspoon salt. Toss a few pods of okra on top of the peas, bring to a boil and cook on low boil for 20-30 minutes. Boiled okra is a personal preference, and I love it. We probably never cook boiled okra when company is coming because some folks are grossed out by it. I see that as your problem and not mine, but out of hospitality concern, I will not force anyone to eat anything they don't like.

My skillet (loose) fried okra is done the way Grandma and my mom cooked it and is not to be confused with the batter coated fried okra you get at the catfish place, or from the gas station hot food case. I like both, but this is not the coated deep-fried okra I show in the next photo.

For grandma's skillet loose fried okra, start with some oil or bacon fat (nice if you have it) to a well-seasoned cast iron or nonstick skillet. While the oil is heating up, add a couple of Tablespoons of white cornmeal to the sliced okra and stir to coat. Add the coated okra to the hot oiled skillet. Add salt (1 teaspoon) to taste, and black pepper (1/2 teaspoon) to taste and cook at medium high temperature. I normally use a lid for the first ten minutes which holds in the steam and speeds up the cooking. Stir occasionally, enough to keep the okra from sticking as it cooks. You can tell where you are by how much the cornmeal has browned. You want to cook it until the okra has broken apart from stirring and the cornmeal is slightly browned but not burnt.

Cornbread:

I have shown this recipe many times. During the depression days when mom and dad were growing up, poor folks who grew up on farms cooked and ate what they had, which was usually corn they grew, dried and ground into cornmeal, vegetables from their garden, and whatever dairy they had. Eggs were too expensive to buy, so they had whatever their chickens were laying. This recipe is from my grandparents, using white cornmeal, a little less flour than meal, salt, and buttermilk. No eggs. My Dad would say, “Cake has eggs and sugar. Cornbread does not.” 

I will eat your cornbread made from a box, but only to be polite. This is a classic Mississippi Delta, country, depression era recipe and what I love. The recipe uses self-rising flour and self-rising cornmeal, both modern adaptations from sometime in the last 80 years. If you use regular cornmeal and AP flour, add 1 teaspoon baking powder and 1 teaspoon baking soda to the ingredients listed. Otherwise, your cornbread will not rise in the oven. Self-rising has these two ingredients added at the processing mill.

If I serve you cornbread, it will be made with Martha White four and Martha White Corn Meal. For a southerner, there is none better than their soft wheat flour and their corn meal. Technically, the gluten differs, depending on whether the wheat is soft or hard grain flour. Northern wheat is hard wheat and has more gluten. It makes cakes, but not so great biscuits and pie crusts. Pillsbury flour is hard wheat flour - good for bread and pizza crust. Martha White is soft wheat flour - good for most other uses.  If you don't agree with me, that is your problem, and I understand your cornbread will not be as good as mine. Martha White has been making their product for a long time and there is none better for southern biscuits, pie crusts, cakes, and cornbread. I understand Yankees cannot buy Martha White product at their grocery stores because it is not sold up there. That is their problem and not mine. I did not tell then to live up there and refuse to accept responsibility for their cornbread failures.

Start with a cast iron skillet. If you don't have one, I feel much sorrow for you. Go to Wally world and buy one, or two or three. Then season it – watch YouTube to see how to do that. It will change your cornbread baking life.

Part of mine. Probably six or seven not shown.
Plus two or three I am on the lookout for.
well maybe more than that....

Preheat oven and empty skillet to 400 degrees F. I preheat my cast iron skillet in the oven as it is preheating. Just before mixing the batter, add one or two Tablespoons of vegetable oil or bacon fat to the hot skillet. Do not mix the batter until the oven and skillet are hot and the oil has been added. The batter mixes quickly and will start rising as soon as it is mixed so the skillet needs to be hot and ready to go when the batter is mixed.

This recipe will make an 8 inch skillet (3 or 4 servings) of cornbread. To make a 6 inch skillet (2 or 3 servings), cut the ingredients by 1/3. To make a 10 inch skillet (5 or 6 servings) double the ingredients.

6, 8, and 10 inch skillets

In a suitable mixing bowl, add 1 cup of white self-rising corn meal, 3/4 cup of self-rising flour and a teaspoon of salt. If using AP flour and cornmeal, also add 1 teaspoon baking powder and 1 teaspoon baking soda.

Add 1/4 cup buttermilk to the dry ingredients and mix. It will not be wet enough after you do this, so slowly add a little more buttermilk and mix, until you get a nice thick batter. Eventually, you will become a pro buttermilk adder.

Add the thick batter to the sizzling hot skillet. The skillet and oil must be preheated to the 400 degree temperature so that the batter sizzles when added. This “frying” when the batter is first added is what makes a nice crispy bottom and side crust on the cornbread.

Bake for 30-40 minutes until the top has browned slightly. At that point the cornbread is done. If your skillet is well seasoned, the cornbread “pone” will fall right out when turned over a plate. If not, gently release it with a table knife and hope for better seasoning the next time. I almost never wash my cornbread skillets, just wipe them with a dry paper towel and put them up when cooled. After many cornbread cooks, they are pretty much nonstick. It is the same with my cast iron corn stick and muffin pans.

I like to put a knife under the cornbread pone to allow the moisture to pass out and not allow the surface touching the plate to get wet. If you don't do this, the side touching the plate will get damp.

I don't know about you, but I want some butter on my cornbread.

Here is my finished plate of vegetables and cornbread. Or maybe it would be better to call it Heaven on a Plate.

As a bonus, here is some mostly veggies food porn for you to look at.

Thanks for looking at my post.