Believe it or not, stuck away in my big freezer, I found several bags of French cut green beans left over from Thanksgiving.  It’s time to clean house and I would like a way to cook up those beans other than the classic green bean casserole that we all know and love, but have had enough of. 

I did stumble across an old scrap of paper with a soup recipe scribbled on it that looks pretty interesting.  The instructions aren’t really detailed, but the ingredients are simple.  The recipe for French Cut Green Bean Soup goes just like this:

Take a bag of frozen French cut green beans (about 4 cups), about 3 medium size potatoes, diced up, 1 good size carrot, sliced, 1 medium onion, diced up, 1 to 2 teaspoons of salt depending on how salty you like your soup, and put this all in a pot, cover with cold water.  Simmer until all the veggies are tender.  Then, mix together in a bowl, 2 tablespoons each flour and butter.  Add 1/2 cup of cream or half ‘n half and mix together.  Then put that mixture into soup and stir well.  Return soup to a gentle bubble for a minute, then turn off heat.  Then, add 2 cups or more of buttermilk, until you like the way the soup looks.  The buttermilk is the trick to this really good soup.

Like I said, this recipe was just scribbled on a piece of scrap paper, so that’s as precise as it gets! 

If you have any recipes you’d like to share that use French cut green beans, even if it’s just an old scribbled recipe that you dug up somewhere, I’d love to hear from you!

I usually have a freezer full of bags of sweet green peas.  Peas are the “go to” vegetable in my house because it’s the one vegetable my kids will eat without a fuss.  I’ll actually “cook” my peas by running hot water over the peas in a colander until they are just thawed, but not hot.  Then, for the kids, I mix them in with some cottage cheese, and for the adults, I serve them on top of a nice, mixed salad full of other goodies like broccoli, chopped egg, mushrooms, grated cheese, and anything else I have in the house to make a salad complete.  Now, everybody is happy.  Kids are eating their vegetables, and liking them, and Mom and Dad have a great salad complete with snappy green peas covering the top.  I rarely cook green peas in boiling water, because the taste is so sweet and fresh when they are just thawed.

Because my kids absolutely love green peas (must be the sweetness) I need to find a thousand-and-one ways to serve peas to my kids so they will not get bored and quit eating them.  Have you ever had that happen?  You finally find something your kids love to eat, so you feed it to them every day, and then, they hate it.  I would like to avoid that trap if possible.  Can you help me please?

Now that I live in the South, my favorite meal to make for my family is Seafood Gumbo, utilizing the plentiful seafood we are fortunate to have available to us.  My problem is this;  I like to use okra as the thickener in my Gumbo, but I never add more than a couple handfuls of frozen okra to a big pot of Gumbo. That leaves me with a lot of frozen okra left every time I make my Seafood Gumbo.  At that rate, I never use up the frozen okra fast enough and I usually end up throwing most of the leftover bag away after it gets lost in my freezer for several months.

If I had something to make with frozen okra that would be delicious, and a little different than just adding it to Gumbo, I could use up my okra and quit wasting it!  I’ve eaten fried okra and have enjoyed that, but I don’t know how to go from frozen to fried without getting mushy results.  Also, kid-friendly recipes with okra would be especially nice.  I know that’s a tall order, but Southerners have learned how to cook with some pretty unique food items, so there must be interesting okra recipes that you’re keeping secret.  Let’s see what you’ve got!

Okay, this is a trick question.  I really don’t have frozen corn any longer… I have bags of thawed corn. My freezer quit on me and I am left now with six bags of thawed whole kernel corn.  I cannot stomach the thought of boiling it up and just eating it as is.  That would just get monotonous and I’ll guarantee by about the second bag, I’d be throwing bags of corn out for the ducks to eat.  I have re-bagged the corn in tightly sealed zipper bags and it is in my refrigerator waiting for a brilliant solution.

There are some good fish or other seafood chowder recipes that I have used in the past, but many of them just don’t use enough corn.  I’ve also enjoyed some excellent corn casserole dishes at potlucks and have ordered Succotash at restaurants, but I don’t have the recipes.

There must be hundreds of ways to use my surplus of whole kernel corn, but when I look in the refrigerator, I panic and all reason seems to elude me!  Please help!