Home » Lifestyles » Home Base: Stewing in my own juice: A beef stew recipe using homegrown tomatoes and okra

“What are we going to do with all this juice?”

I acted like I didn’t hear my wife as I ladled juice from the tomatoes in the roaster and poured it into a stock pot several weeks ago on what has become our annual canning day for our excess backyard garden tomatoes.

This year we produced 200-ish pounds of tomatoes and canned 115 pounds. That will get our family of five through the winter for tomato sauce or any other tomato-based dish without having to resort to buying such things at the grocery store.

But the juice question loomed large. We hadn’t really saved much of it before, and the stock pot was getting pretty full.

“I see you haven’t answered,” she pressed on. “That’s a lot of juice.”

“Well…,” I started before rattling off what few educated guesses I had for her question, most of which, of course, were wrong.

In desperation, I added, “We could make soup!”

Amelia doesn’t like soup, or at least she says she doesn’t. She’s liked the soups I’ve made over the years, but she forgets (easy to do when I’ve made all of three soups over the past eight years).

What she really doesn’t like, though, is my use of “We” when clearly it should be “I.”

“WE will can the juice if YOU make the soup,” she said, laying down a gauntlet she did not believe I’d pick up.

All told we canned 23.5 quarts of crushed tomatoes and 12.5 quarts of juice. As we took it all to the basement for storage the next day, the shelving of each juice jar came with Amelia’s playfully smirking look to me that articulated, “Here’s YOUR juice, Honey.”

Meanwhile, the refrigerator started filling up fast with okra, also from the garden. We usually fry it. We all like it that way, even our youngest daughter, age 7, who thinks they’re some sort of chips.

But several days’ worth of harvest produced a lot of okra. I started to think of different ways to use it. Then I reached down and picked up the soup, or in this case stew, gauntlet.

Obviously, tomato juice and okra would star in this concoction. I relied on my previous soup-making experience to figure other things to throw in — stew meat, a chopped leek and pearled barley. I shared my idea with Amelia, who suggested I add corn. As usual, she was right.

You could also add potatoes and carrots if you wanted to, I guess, but I don’t really care for those flavors in vegetable stew.

All told, prep took about 15 minutes and much of it can be done concurrently with other ingredients cooking. Total cook time is about two hours in a stock pot on the stove, and it makes a nice, hearty stew with rich tomato flavor.

I made way more than our family needed for one meal, but the leftovers are great for lunches through the week.

Oh, and my soup-hating wife loved it, or at least she said she did.

“YOU” CAN DO IT BEEF AND OKRA STEW

Ingredients 5 pints of tomato juice 1.5 pounds of beef stew meat 4 cups of chopped okra 1 can of whole kernel corn, drained 1.5 cups pearled barley 1 leek, chopped 5 garlic cloves, minced 2 tablespoons of salt 2 tablespoons of black pepper 1 tablespoon of basil 1 tablespoon of fat or lard

Directions ■ In a stockpot, heat fat. Add stew meat and sear in the fat for about 5 minutes. ■ Add salt, pepper and basil. Stir. ■ Pour in tomato juice. Add garlic. Cover and bring to boil. Once boiling, reduce to low heat. Keep covered, but stir occasionally, for about 1 hour. ■ Add okra, leek, barley and corn. Cover and again bring to boil. Then reduce heat and keep covered for another 45 minutes to an hour, or until barley is soft.

Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.

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