Bacon wrapped pimento cheese stuffed okra

I grew up mainly in the lowcountry of South Carolina. Because neither of my parents are Southern, I did not eat a lot of Southern cuisine when I was a kid. I probably would not have enjoyed much of it anyway because I was such a picky eater. I'm a quarter Italian and I did not even like spaghetti sauce for the longest time!

Over the years my palette has expanded greatly. One food item that I did not give a chance until a couple years ago was okra. It took living in California and having dinner with a friend from Washington state for me to try it. And it was delicious! Of course, it was the fried variety, so how could that not taste good?

Fast forward to moving back to the South... We have planted our vegetable garden and I included okra. It has been growing quite nicely lately and I have amassed a lot of okra from it. I did not realize the plant has such beautiful, delicate flowers.

Having never cooked it before, I searched Pinterest for some recipes. I found one that sounded perfect... bacon wrapped stuffed okra! The actual recipe calls for a shrimp filling. I'm still a picky eater; I don't eat seafood. But I was planning on making pimento cheese with our homegrown pimento peppers. Wouldn't that taste amazing stuffed inside a bacon wrapped piece of okra? I think so!

Fourth of July gave me the perfect opportunity to try this dish. It was easy to assemble and tasted FANTASTIC! It is just as good as fried okra...if not better.

For the pimento cheese, I kind of followed the recipe from Eleven Magnolia Lane. It's OK, but I've had better. I just have to find the recipe! Feel free to use your own favorite recipe or store bought (if you have to).

For the okra, I followed the instructions from I Heart Publix. The recipe suggests using regular bacon and not thick cut bacon. I happened to have thick cut and it worked out just fine.

Tending my garden

Growing up, my mom was always gardening. We moved just about every three years (unrelated to the military), so she had a lot of opportunities to start new gardens. And for the most part we always lived in new construction houses, so the yard was a clean slate to begin with. However, while I was younger did I have any interest in gardening? Of course not. That changed once we had our first town house in Ohio.

While renting, we were pretty limited in what we could do in the yard of each house we have lived in. We have planted several flowers and such in containers, but that is hit and miss with me.

When we moved here and bought our first house, I had my first real chance at a garden. This is a new construction house, so the yard was a clean slate. It came with grass and some plants in the front flower beds, but everything else was on us.

Being an environmentally-friendly person, I was most interested in creating a bee/butterfly/hummingbird garden. Bees are essential to our food production system. Pesticides and such are causing large amounts of casualties among bee communities, so planting bee friendly plants and flowers and avoiding pesticide use is super helpful. I made my list of plants and flowers to look out for and headed to Lowe's.

Chocolate mint

Citronella...my attempt to keep the mosquitoes at bay

More herbs

Lime basil and lemon balm both smell fantastic!

The cilantro (behind the salvia) has doubled in size over the past two weeks. I better start using it before it's taller than me.

We also wanted to plant some fruits and veggies. We had a tomato plant in California that did really well and we wanted to try a few other things.

Two apple trees and a magnolia tree

Strawberry flower

Okra

Broccoli

We planted three blueberry plants. Two are really tiny and we're hoping they grow nice and tall with lots of blueberries.

Watermelon! We attempted watermelon while in California, but it never really produced anything. Here's to attempt #2!

Spring flowers

Shameless plug for a fundraiser I am participating in....

The Alpha Omega Alumni Chapter is fundraising with Dutch Mill Bulbs to earn money for our upcoming twenty year reunion! All items are guaranteed to grow and bloom, and our group earns 50% profit on every sale. I hope you will be able to help.

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My garden

The gardening bug hit me again. And thanks to my wonderful and strong husband, we now have a nice little flower bed in the backyard. Charles did all the hard work of digging and clearing the grass away. And I did all the easy stuff like planting the flowers.

We planted four day lilies in the back and three poppies in front. The day lilies are supposed to attract hummingbirds and butterflies. And I just love poppies! They are so pretty. I also planted daisy and dwarf sunflower seeds so we have to wait and see how successful those will be. It still needs some mulch, but overall I am very happy with my little garden.

Gardening pictures

As promised, here are the pictures from our gardening experiment. So far they are alive. Although, one of our flowers mysteriously lost two of its buds. Charles immediately wanted to blame the neighbor kids. They are always running through our yard. But who really knows.

Flowers with the Fire Bush

Calvin in the window admiring our new bushes

Gardening virgin

I've never really been into the gardening thing and until we moved here I've never had a place to do any gardening. I don't have a particularly green thumb, but our two house plants that we purchased at Ikea when we lived in Houston are still alive which is very encouraging.

Our townhouse has two flower beds in the front. One has a giant Fire Bush (at least that's what my neighbor said it was called). But the front of that bed and the flower bed under the front window are completely empty. Yesterday, Charles and I finally went to Home Depot (I'm usually a Lowe's girl, but Home Depot is closer). We purchased 4 plants--white daisies and another flower that looks like daisies but are Winthrop colors! My original idea was to plant them in the bed under the front window, but Charles wants to get some bushes or something green to plant there first. So I planted them in front of the fire bush.

I had a hell of a time digging the holes for these flowers. The ground was already wet from the past two days' rain. And it was very clay-like. And once I got like 4-5 inches deep, it was all rock. Very tough, but I got all 4 holes dug and the plants planted. Now I'm hoping they'll live. Then I can feel confident enough to move on to the next flower bed.

I'll post pictures of my flowers once I get some new mulch. It desperately needs it to look pretty.