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Yummy Oven Fried Green Beans!

22 March 2009 by Julie 14 Comments

This is one of our family’s favorites. My children just love them. I always have to make extra. It’s very easy to fix too!

Here’s what you need:

* Green Beans
* 1 of cup Milk
* ½ cup Bread Crumbs
* ½ cup Parmesan Cheese
* 1 egg

Directions:

* In a bowl combine the egg and milk. Stir it up.
* Then in another bowl mix together the bread crumbs and Parmesan cheese. You can adjust the amount of bread crumbs you use and the amount of Parmesan cheese according to your taste. Or if you are watching calories you might want to use more bread crumbs.
* Preheat your oven to 375.
* You will need to spray your baking sheet with a Pam or use Reynold’s non stick Foil. I used Pam non stick cooking spray.
* It does not matter if you use fresh or frozen green beans. I used frozen green beans. I didn’t allow for the green beans to thaw I just went ahead and did it with them frozen and it turn out just fine.
* Take your Green Beans and dip them in the milk and egg mixture. Then dip them in the mixture of bread crumbs and Parmesan cheese.
* Lay the green beans on a baking sheet on a single layer not touching. Then bake until golden brown about 15 to 18 minutes. I flipped mine once about half way through.

You might want to dip into a Ranch dressing or some other type of dip. One of my children does and two does not. So it’s up to you!

julie-02

Vegetable garden tips increase chances of success

March 28, 2009

With our economy in such a fragile state and thousands of persons losing their jobs, it seems there is a renewed interest in raising some food in home gardens once again. Of course, not everyone has ground space to plant a garden, but there are at least a few vegetable varieties or cultivars that have been developed for container culture.
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Individuals who have only a 10-by-10-foot garden space can produce an amazing amount of food. Such home-produced food is generally superior in nutritive value to similar items bought at a grocery store since it can be harvested and consumed immediately, thereby capturing all of the vitamins it contains. Many of these vitamins are either lost or diminished in quantity when several days elapse between harvest in some distant field and the time it reaches your table.

A willingness to do the necessary manual labor to grow some vegetables and the understanding of the valuable benefits to be gained from a “back-yard garden” are the ingredients for success in such a venture. Nothing fancy is required in the way of equipment as a hoe, shovel and rake are about the only basics. Other than seed and a little general purpose fertilizer plus a sunny, well-drained area of soil, few additional expenses will be encountered.

Now you are ready to begin. But before you do, let me share with you a few “tricks of the trade” that will help you in numerous ways.

• First of all, buy fresh seed of recommended cultivars and use the available space to grow the kinds of vegetables that you and your family enjoy eating. Insofar as possible, grow those vegetables that produce over a relatively long period of time. For example, peppers, tomatoes and eggplants can provide food for several weeks while cabbage, cauliflower and turnips give us a one-time harvest.

• Wrap the stems of tomatoes with aluminum foil from 3 inches above the soil line to about that far below the soil line to keep cut worms from severing the stem at the surface of the ground.

• Prune off all but one “sucker” from tomato plants. A “sucker” is the axillary shoot that grows in the joint where each leaf is attached to the main stalk. Leave only the first one below the first blossom cluster to appear. (You will notice that this one is usually far more vigorous than any of the others.) Continue to remove all suckers from both stems that remain. This two-stem system encourages earlier harvest and good-sized fruit.

• Use ladies’ discarded nylon stockings to tie tomato plants to their stakes. These are soft, strong and decay resistant. Celebrity is probably the most disease-resistant cultivar and is a determinate type tomato. Determinate tomatoes were developed for machine harvest and terminate vine growth with a cluster of blossoms at a height of some 4 or 5 feet. Indeterminate tomatoes maintain a vegetative bud at the end of the vine and can grow to a length of 20 feet or more in a single season. Most of the older varieties are of this type.
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• A plastic mulch covering the ground at the base of plants such as tomatoes and peppers deters weeds and reduces soil moisture loss. Although you can purchase the black plastic mulch in rolls 3 feet wide and 50 feet long, it’s sometimes hard to find them in the stores. Black garbage bags can be cut to a suitable size and used for this purpose and you can get several out of a single bag. Once in place, cover the plastic with an organic mulch or hold them down with heavy objects. The mulch covering is the best option.

• Growing cucumbers? Train them up a trellis, wire fence or other support. Research has proven that by so doing you will triple production and reduce disease problems. Besides, they’re much easier to pick when growing on a trellis.

• Squash vine borers can be very destructive on squash plants. Keep a good general-purpose insecticide on the first 12 inches of the stem beginning at the base of the plant from the time the plants begin to grow.

• Make a shallow furrow with a garden hoe in which to plant direct seeded plants such as okra, peas, radishes, etc. Place a small amount of a wet potting soil in the bottom of the furrow and scatter the seed on top of this before covering with soil. This is a particularly good practice on very sandy soils.

• Soak okra seed in water overnight before planting to soften their hard seed coats.

• Use drip irrigation to provide the needed water rather than sprinkler type devices. Not only will much less water be used with drip applied water, but also weeds between garden rows will not be encouraged and diseases will generally not be as much of a problem. The inexpensive “seep” hoses work extremely well and are widely available.

You will find that the above garden tips will help you as a gardener to enjoy gardening more, spend less effort producing your food and avoid some of the common garden problems. But please know that these represent only a few of the tips that skilled gardeners have discovered over years of growing a variety of vegetables.

•

Joe W. White is a retired Extension horticulturist with the LSU Agricultural Center. Write to him in care of The Times, P.O. Box 30222, Shreveport, LA 71130-0222; or e-mail jo2bar@comcast.net. Please include a stamped, self-addressed envelope for written replies.

http://www.shreveporttimes.com/article/20090328/LIVING0402/903280302