Freezing Okra and Canning Quantities Caveat

In the previous post, Julie commented:

Could you share how you freeze okra? Our family loves it breaded and fried,
but I have never had any success freezing it so we only eat it in the summer
time. Thanks! I like reading your list because I can compare mine with you and see if I am on track with certain amounts.

First of all, let me qualify my amounts by stating that, for some reason this year, we had an incredibly disorganized pantry and, for a time, "lost" quite a few jars of green beans and of tomatoes.

Also, last summer, Keith assigned lunch prep to our now-15yo daughter, and dinner prep to our now-17yo daughter. This has been wonderful for all of us (and for their future husbands!), but it took them awhile to get used to using the resources we had on hand.

Therefore, we had more canned goods left over this year than we normally would, so we're starting with more than normal.

Now for freezing okra. We're like you on that; we haven't frozen it because it just didn't seem to work well. Then we had some that friends of ours froze last year, and it was so good, that I got the instructions from them.

Clean the okra. Blanche it 3 minutes. Slice it to desired size (we found that close to an inch was better than smaller, which didn't seem to hold up as well when we were slicing and breading it.) Toss it in flour, then buttermilk, then seasoned-to-your-taste cornmeal. Set them on cookie sheets so that they're not touching; freeze. When frozen, put in bags and place bags in freezer until you're ready to devour them!

Mary Susan

BTW, we used parchment on the cookie sheets, just to make sure the okra was easy to remove. I don't know if this was necessary, but I didn't want to risk losing any!