Bobert has it right on the money. I am "shopping" my freezer and pantry these days, looking for recipes that will use the ingredients I have frozen or canned. And last summer I prepared many of the things I froze as I would need them for specific dishes. Suddenly it was a lot easier to prepare the eggplant to freeze - slice and bread and fry, slice and fry, or quarter and fry, they are different recipes. If you don't have a plan, it gets old in the fridge waiting to be stored. Okra, peppers, tomatoes, more peppers, and I buy meat on sale and package it for single portions before freezing.

I've found several things I can stir fry okra in, beyond the scrumptious breaded and fried version. This was a vegetable new to me last year.

I eat meat, certainly, but when I grind a pound of pot roast to use for taco meat or burrito filling, I add a couple of cups of cooked beans (black, kidney, pinto, whatever is handy) and cook with it. Like he says, have some rice on the side and this is a healthy mix. You do get essential nutrients from meat, but you can mix it up with a lot of other stuff (as much as I occasionally like a seasoned, unembellished steak every so often). I picked up a large port tenderloin ($1.99 a pound at my local discount grocery, and it isn't full of the added saline injection) that I'll use some of it with my tomatoes and onions and eggplant in a casserole this week (a Middle Eastern recipe).

SRS