Fried Okra {served best with sweet tea}

September 13, 2013September 30, 2015 Lindsey P. BrackettLeave a comment

Husband chopping okra. It’s his favorite side dish.

We have a CSA this year and okra is one of the few crops that survived a summer of constant rain and little sunshine. Now it’s September and I’m still getting a pound or so a week, hence I’ve become a bit of an expert at okra frying. Sometimes we roast it too. That’s a lot less work and healthier. But it’s just not the same as a mound of okra fried crispy alongside a homemade meatloaf and some mashed potatoes with a sweating glass of sweet tea.

Fried Okra (adapted from Simply in Season)
1 lb fresh okra (choose pieces about 2 inches long)
1 c buttermilk
3/4 c (or thereabouts) cornmeal
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1/4-1/2 tsp black pepper
1/2 cup canola or vegetable oil

Wash okra and remove stems and ends. Chop into half-inch thick pieces. Place in a shallow dish and pour buttermilk over to soak. In another shallow dish (or gallon size ziploc bag) mix cornmeal, salt, and pepper. If you don’t have cornmeal, you can use plain flour, but cornmeal gives a good crunch. Dredge okra pieces in cornmeal mix (or drop by the handful into bag and shake). Spread pieces evenly on a rimmed pan and place in the freezer for 15-30 minutes. This helps the batter set and keeps it from falling off in the grease while you’re frying. Pour oil into a large skillet, you want it about a 1/4 inch high. Heat on medium until it sizzles when you sprinkle cornmeal grains on it. Drop okra in hot grease (carefully!) and cook, stirring and turning, until golden brown and crispy. Serve hot.

P.S. It’s best to do this while the biscuits are cooking. The timing works out well. Did I mention my mother is an amazing southern cook and taught me everything I know? Although recently she actually said buying frozen breaded okra is a sight easier than making it yourself. I nearly fainted from shock.

Freedom Walking and Hot Air Balloons {Behind the Scenes}

September 10, 2013September 30, 2015 Lindsey P. BrackettLeave a comment

Hot air balloons and I seem to enjoy a last minute relationship. Maybe it’s because in and of themselves the balloons seem to evoke a sense of spontaneity that is often absent from my planned and scheduled attempts at motherhood, or maybe it’s just simply because if I ponder a decision involving gas money, restaurants, and extra cash for too long, I talk myself out of it.

I’m so glad I didn’t back out of this one.

Callaway Gardens was hosting a weekend of balloon themed festivities and admission was half-price if you arrived before 9 a.m. So on Friday evening, we put on hold everything that was wringing our life out and gave ourselves over to children and friends and sunshine.

We slept over at with our friends Brooke and Matt, who are are the kind of friends who don’t mind when you call at bedtime on Thursday night to say you’ll be there tomorrow. They’re the kind of friends who are totally on board with waking up six kids at daylight to see a spectacle of color against a misty morning sky.

The downed balloon beachside was called “Freedom Walk” and inside children squealed and floundered on the grass with beach balls. The air was close and humid, but the vision was breathtaking, a kaleidoscope of colors that burned brightly as the morning sun rose higher.

We picnicked and swam and for the first time all summer, my children could play with their daddy. He’s made a near full recovery. It’s amazing how quickly we can forget what really matters. I’d been drowning in a sea of hopelessness and I’d forgotten that for a time before this summer began, I had realized just how precious life can be.

After Amelia and I rode that hot air balloon in June, I realized it was the fire that lifts those balloons into the air to catch a breath of wind and fly away.

And as much as I’d like to believe it so, that’s never a spontaneous act. It’s carefully planned and considered and just the right amount of fuel is used to carry that brightness into the sky.

So the same for us: these fires that seem so insurmountable in life?
If we let Him, a great and merciful God can use that fire to carry us to a far better place.

Joining with Crystal Stine and an amazing community of women this week who dare to bare the soul behind the pictures. Tell me, what’s behind your scene?

Friday Five

Red {Five Minute Friday}

September 6, 2013September 30, 2015 Lindsey P. Brackett1 Comment

It’s Friday and that means it’s time to write for five minutes, no editing, no backtracking, no overthinking. Lisa-Jo provides a prompt and in this community we write and then we encourage one another. So link it up, friends, and share the love because “Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.” E.B White via Lisa Jo.

This week’s prompt is….

Red

There’s one of those red solo cups someone wrote a song about on my counter but there’s nothing medicinal in it. Just remnants of sweet tea and the fatigue of a mama too tired to think about the load unload rinse wash repeat cycle of dishes for one more weary day.

That cup’s a token of a week gone wrong and right in so many ways it should be reality television. But it’s not. It’s just my life.

It’s all our lives really. Days that are harder than the one before and weeks that suck all of life’s joy down the drain with the soggy cheerios because someone said or someone did or someone didn’t or someone should’ve.

I made dinner from scratch tonight and fried okra while shielding my favorite shirt from grease splatters and the toothcutting baby boy pulled my legs and the homework was almost done and my big girls shelled a peck of purple hulled peas. But I couldn’t bring myself to use real glasses. It was too much in a long list of too many reasons why I felt deflated and flattened and red solo cups were easy.

In a week of hard choices and difficult decisions and bitter tears and hurt hearts, choosing the cup I didn’t have to wash was easy.

Friday Five · reflections

Worship {Five Minute Friday}

August 30, 2013September 30, 2015 Lindsey P. BrackettLeave a comment

This week’s prompt is….

Worship

Churches aren’t perfect. They’re made up of messy, broken, difficult, cantankerous, controlling people who have all been amazingly forgiven.

Forgiveness is the song of the church. It’s the hymn that’s sung over and over by a great God who is bigger than us because He can forgive so much more readily, so much more easily, so much more forgetfully than we ever can.

Church is supposed to be the place you come when you have no where else to go. The place where we can be raw and real and so much less than perfect. The place you need after the Sunday morning meltdowns over shoes and hairbows or the sanctuary you crave after chaos and confusion have had their reign everywhere else.

But the church itself? That’s not worship. That’s a place that feeds worship and communion and fellowship.

But worship…that can happen when you aren’t even looking for it because He’s always looking for you.

I’ve gone to church my whole life and been in many different settings from mountainside chapels to stained glassed steeples.

But in May I sat and held a friend while she cried from the depths of her soul and there was nothing to be said except to invoke the name of Jesus. It didn’t look like worship.

But it was.

Always, always, that is worship at its truest. The call to Christ and the forgiveness of sins that tears down the veil.

May you experience it today when you need it most.

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When It Looks Like You Have It All Together {Behind the Scenes Linkup}

August 28, 2013September 30, 2015 Lindsey P. BrackettLeave a comment

In case you didn’t know, I’m quite good at faking it. Looking like I have it all together and organized and keeping my cool in front of people who have no idea who I really am and have never seen me ugly cry or throw a book or slam the lid of the laptop.

I apparently reserve all those temper tantrums for my children and those who have proven they won’t leave me on the side of the road if they have to stop and let me throw up because my stomach is all in knots over some commitment I secretly wish I hadn’t agreed to.

September, October, November, and December are staring me down on the calendar and threatening to delete all my neatly arranged events if I try to schedule one more item. Sure, when there’s a neat table of a rehearsal schedule all sectioned off into scenes and hours and dates everything looks manageable. Of course, when you help enter all 42 moms into the registration database for MOPS International, it feels incredible to know you’re part of a ministry that’s reaching so many.

But then another actor drops out of the show and there’s far fewer childcare workers than there are children and the baby only took one nap for one hour the whole day and suddenly those pictures aren’t just fun snippets into how I’m figuring out the crazy.

Suddenly they’re sirens screaming at me to figure out my focus and just. do. that.

Oh, too late. Because I’m committed, I’m in, and from here until Dec.16 when I can lay Marley and Scrooge back to rest on the shelf, I’ve got to believe this instead.

I’m dreaming big enough to believe that where God leads, He also proceeds.

There will be more than enough workers for the sixty children that will accompany forty moms to our first MOPS meeting on September 6th.

The people I need are going to be in my show, and for eight days in December, people will remember that God truly does bless us, every one.

These next few months may not be my time to make this blog and my writing the highest priority, but someday soon I will have the opportunity to follow through the God-sized dreams I have for this.

Dare to dream big.

And when you get scared and need to cry on the floor of the bathroom, I’ll scoot over and let you sit by me.

Joining with Crystal Stine and an amazing community of women this week who dare to bare the soul behind the pictures. Tell me, what’s behind your scene?