Southern Woman Adventures: Okra and Homemade Salsa

     We picked even more tomatoes this week, and a little bit of okra (my favorite!). Most of the tomatoes went to Meagan's stockpile of tomato soup, but we saved a little bit to try out something new. My cousin Angela from Corpus Christi, TX, or 'North Mexico' as they call it, sent us her 100% authentic salsa recipe to try out.
     Note - this recipe is roughly a double of hers, about six cups.

First, about six or seven cups of tomatoes. Peeled and ready to go in the food processor.

All produce other than the tomatoes I bought yesterday at Kroger. They have really good, fresh produce, and they'll have the oddball ingredients you need, like sweet onions or serrano peppers, plus fresh herbs too.

Garlic. We used half of a head of garlic, about five sections.

Sweet onion. They were HUGE so I only used a fourth of one.

Jalapenos. We actually ended up using three to give it the heat we wanted, but we didn't use the seeds or inner membranes. Angela said if you like something spicier you can add the seeds, or add a hotter pepper, like a serrano.

Cleaned out peppers.

Fresh cilantro. Definitely a must.

About two big handfuls of leaves stripped from the stems (we used a good bit extra than the recipe says, but it gave it a great fresh taste)

One lime's zest plus the juice of three limes, also more than the recipe said, but it added to the fresh taste too.

2 tsp salt and sugar, and 1 tsp ground cumin. Sorry there's no sugar in this picture, but we have a very old Tupperware container for our sugar and it's not the most photogenic.

The diced up peppers, onion, and garlic. They don't need to be perfect since they're going in the food processor anyway, but the smaller pieces make it easier.

All the non tomato ingredients, pre-food processor.

After pulsing a few times in the processor until it's as smooth as you want - we wanted a really juicy, thin salsa - you cook it on the stove for thirty minutes, then taste to see what more it needs. We ended up adding a little more pepper, some tobasco, and salt.

Yield: three pint jars...

And two mini jars for Molly to take to college!

Next up - okra! I love love love fried okra, it is my absolute favorite, so if I want any I get to put it up. I actually am not learning this new this year, I've put up okra a few years before.

Slice the clean, damp (that's important) okra into small pieces.

Yes, I actually did more than just take the pictures, I promise.

Bowl full of sliced, damp okra.

Add flour and cornmeal in a 1:2 ratio.

Toss to lightly coat the okra. The okra being damp is what helps the breading stick to it. My mom helped me with this part...those are her hands there :)

Then all you do is bag it up!

My yield of the day! Just freeze until you're ready to eat, and it's amazing when you do :)

Thrifty Finds!

     I have had an uncommonly good week of shopping this week. Usually if you go in a store just to look, you never find anything, but I've hit the jackpot several times!



     First at Tuesday Morning. I don't shop here often, but if I'm bored I like to see what all kind of neat things they have. It's never the same two times you go, so you never get bored. Normally I go straight for their glassware - I have this thing for crystalware and interesting wine glasses, and I've been looking for two specific glasses for a while - but I didn't find any that just tickled my fancy. So as I was browsing around, I happened upon this lovely -

It was on the clearance rack, which at Tuesday Morning is like last call of shopping.

It's even prettier out of the box. And you know why it was clearanced out? One of the mirror tiles had come loose and needed glueing back in. I think I can handle a little superglue for a great deal!

Originally $90, clearanced out for $20. I'll buy that.

I also found a fancy immersion blender, and I've been looking for one for ages. Actually, I had one when I lived in my apartment, but in the moving process it got lost somehow and I found another at a price I liked.

I like that price. 

     A few days later I was in Hobby Lobby poking around, and they had a mega sale on some of their furniture and decor stuff. I mean, it's always on some kind of sale at Hobby Lobby, but this was like 70% off. I fell in love with these two little tables, and they just had to come home with me :)

Table number one, just a little side table, but it had that awesome band of glitz around the top I just loved. I have a place in my room that's just perfect for it.

Table number one's price. For a table I don't have to do anything creative to and it's already fabulous I LOVE that price!

Table number two is even cooler, distressed black iron. I thought at first it was a set of three tables...

Table in it's compact form...

But it actually pulls out into a step-down table! 

Isn't that awesome? I have no idea where it's going yet, but I knew it was going in my house somewhere!

     Last but not least was actually a Wal-Mart find. We started canning tomatoes last week, and this week we've moved on to salsa. My mom found a brand name food processor, the big one with all the attachments, on sale for $30! Those things are normally like $70. So I went back today and got me one! There's no way I'll ever be able to find one that nice and cheap ever again! So I reckon I'll just have a food processor to add to my hope chest...hope attic-full more like! I stopped being able to fit all my stuff in a chest a LONG time ago :)

If yall want one, you better go quick! They only had a few left, so go now and maybe you'll get lucky!

Project Kitchen Organize!

     While all the flooring chaos has been going on in our house (see my blog here!) I decided to let my OCD monster loose in our kitchen cabinets. We have gorgeous cabinets in our house, especially in the kitchen, and they're built amazingly well. Both super strong and also a great combination of cabinet space/big deep drawers/little drawers, but after living here for a few years stuff got all jumbled up and messy.
     I can't do messy as a continuous state. Temporary mess, that's fine. Mess that you have to deal with for the foreseeable future, no way. So I bought a collection of shelf organizer racks at the Mart of Wal, and went to town. I swapped out the casserole dishes from a bottom-shelf cabinet with the baking pans that were in the big bottom drawer. It was driving me nuts having to dig out EVERY casserole dish we owned, EVERY time we needed one, just because the one you needed was always on the bottom of the stack. Once swapped, the casserole dishes fit perfectly one per organizer rack slot, my cupcake and baking pan collection and five different bundt pans were actually accessible instead of all jumbled on top of each other, and the world was at peace once more. Once I got all the rest of the cabinet squared away, I was pretty happy with my day's work.

These racks/dividers are four dollars and change at Wal-Mart. Miracle tools.

Top shelf has vertically stacked cake pans on the racks, no more digging through them in a big old drawerful of pans and other baking related odds and ends.

All the muffin/cupcake tins, square brownie tins, and even my heart shaped tins stack up pretty and neat. Underneath are the pizza baking stones we never use got from The Pampered Chef waaay back when people used to have Pampered Chef, Tupperware, all those kinds of parties. 

The whole cabinet. Most used bundt pans in the front, as well as the nice serving bowls there. Stuff like springform pans for cheesecakes and older glass bowls we don't use much get back-cabinet duty. 

There used to be a ton of junk mail, old phone books, lunch boxes, you name it under there with the casserole dishes. It was kind of a catch-all whenever we needed to clean the table off in a hurry. You all have one of those spots, for those 'Quick, hide this mess, your Aunt So-and-so just drove up!' moments. Now you know it's been majorly cleaned and organized if I'm getting down and taking a picture of inside my kitchen cabinets to put on a public post for the world to see! It's like you're all going to be digging through my cabinets haha!

This is a huge drawer built under the oven. Formerly the home of the baking pans, pie plates, etc. Now it holds only casserole dishes, all lined up so you don't have to take every single one out just to get the one you needed. Just slip out the one you want, slide it back in once you take it out of the dishwasher. This might be my greatest idea for my home to date. (Yes, we have ENTIRELY too many casserole dishes. Never in my memory have we actually used them all, or even half of them, at once. Maybe it's like a collection thing?)

The cookie sheet/mixing bowl cabinet. Formerly the cookie sheet/muffin tin cabinet. Now our pans stack up without sliding all over the catty-whompus tins that leaned every which way up under there, and we have room for the mixing bowls we use all the time. The mixer is up on the shelf there as well, along with parts to the turkey fryer and the meat tenderizer contraption thing only my dad can put together.

My mom had the bright idea to use little Command hooks inside our cabinets to hang things like our strainers and frying pan covers...way better than them running around loose taking up space.

Lucy got curious as to why I was down on my knees with my camera looking in our cabinets haha.

She also hung one in our measuring cups/baking tools drawer for hanging our measuring spoons on. No more digging around in the bottom of the drawer for tiny spoons!

And it worked great for hanging up the weird kitchen utensils that don't really fit into drawers well and are too strange shaped to lay flat in a cabinet, like the ginormous cheese grater we have here.

This is technically in our pantry, not our kitchen, but it still counts. More command hooks to hold all my baking racks.

And plenty of storage to hold all my cake decorating goodies!

     Needless to say, I am much happier with our kitchen now! Organization is amazing.

New Dining Room

     It's been a busy busy BUSY two weeks en la casa de los Falkners. We decided a while back to have our dining room floor redone, since I'm so handily hooked up at the flo' sto' and all. Our dogs had been using our rarely used, out of the way dining room as an occasional pit stop without our knowledge, and once we found out about it our wood floors were not in a good shape. We have rather nice wood flooring throughout the house, except for the bathrooms, laundry, and kitchen. So, of course we weren't exactly pleased when we found out we were having to rip up our dining room floor. My parents finally picked out a tile we all liked and that went with the red walls, the wood entryway floor, and the neutral kitchen tile. And we packed up all our chairs and china, moved the table and china cabinet - not the easiest thing, and got settled in for a week of dust and noise.
     Three days of working men in our house later, the fun process of re-installing the two-piece china cabinet, and cleaning, recleaning, and rerecleaning the floor...

The wood floor of the entryway (what used to be in the dining room) next to the new tile

The empty floor once we got the china cabinet back installed. It took a fair little bit of Dremelling and shoving to make it fit in the same cut-outs in the baseboards it came out of. Seems the new tile was a few millimeters taller than the old wood, so it threw off our old cutout heights...fun stuff!

Full room view...pre table and chairs. No, we don't keep our curtains tucked up in the windowsill on one side, that side was mopped under and the curtain was trying not to get wet.

     We just love it! My mom has been mopping constantly since we got in in, trying to get the last bit of grout residue off so we can show it off haha.