Legacy Writing 365:195

When I’m cooking, it often seems like there are a whole lot of people in the kitchen with me. I don’t mean physically, because as most people will tell you, unless someone has a job to do, I don’t want ANYone in my kitchen, and I’m always driving out people and dogs with commands and threats.

As I began preparing fresh okra today, I thought as I always do about Jane Jane, pictured below with Papa.

While she cooked, to keep me out from under her feet, Jane Jane would give me the peelings and snippings from her vegetables in a big bowl and put me on the back porch. That way I could play “cooking” to my heart’s content, and she could keep an eye on me through the screen door without worrying I might get into something I shouldn’t or get hurt in the kitchen. Long before I ever ate okra, I played with it.

To say I was not an adventurous eater as a child would be an understatement. I liked what I liked and wouldn’t try anything else. Dislikes included all breads, many vegetables, and the usual weird stuff like beets, liver, and brussels sprouts. So it wasn’t until I went to college and met Debbie (who became my roommate multiple times during undergraduate and graduate school), that I would try new things. She persuaded me to try boiled okra in our dorm cafeteria.

When I confessed to Granny, pictured below with her great-granddaughter Jennifer, that I’d eaten and liked boiled okra, she cooked me a skillet of fried okra. Mercy, it was SO good.

There was no way to avoid it–I had to admit to my mother that after all those years of shunning her okra, I’d decided I loved it. She taught me to cook it.

Those of you who like my fried okra owe a debt to the women above. Still, I know there are okra haters among you. You’re in good company. Guinness, who’ll eat damn near anything, rushed into the kitchen earlier when the end of a pod of okra rolled off the counter and hit the floor. She sniffed it, laid down next to it, and ignored it, as if to say, “You got anything better up there?”