Fried Vegetables Are HEALTHY?

hey everybody welcome back to living traditions homestead well it's summer the garden is in full production and for me that means one thing fried okra I absolutely love fried okra we don't eat a lot of fried things around the homestead because we try to be a little bit healthy but in the summer fried okra is one of those things I just can't live without you guys I know you're gonna hate me when I tell you this but I don't like fried okra I don't even really like okra at all the consistency is just too much for me the flavor is good but if you don't like okra you know what I'm talking about but there are things in the garden right now that I absolutely love breaded and fried and you can probably guess it it's peppers so today we're going to show you a couple things that we've been working on in the house some breaded and fried things that just are a little bit healthier we want to live a better life a healthier life and we think we have found a really great solution so we're gonna get pickin in the garden we're gonna get all of the veggies that we need to take inside and fry and we're gonna show you how we do it so this year we're growing two varieties of okra my absolute favorite type of okra is called clemson spineless it's a pretty common variety the other kind that we're growing this year are these right here which are much shorter and fatter than the clemson spineless these are called Eagle Pass they're an heirloom from Baker Creek and the selling point on these is that they're supposed to be less slimy than the clemson spineless sarah has a real problem with the sly meanness of okra so I'm hoping that these will be the key to making her like okra so I'm gonna pick about four of these and then we'll go down and pick four of my favorite now these are the clemson spineless they're much longer and skinnier but they are absolutely great these are my favorite type of okra to grow so I'm going to pick a few of those as well [Music] now for some peppers I'm gonna pick some nada pay nose which are jalapenos that aren't spicy I have been doing a lot of spicy peppers every day for a couple of weeks so I feel like I need a break so I'm gonna pick some of these and then also the kids can try them I'll pick a few of these now toupee nose and then I'll also pick some banana peppers which are right next door here we're having a fantastic pepper year this year all of them are doing so great I think that will be plenty of fried food let's go get started in the house all right we're in the house it's time to show you guys what we've been working on now if you've been following our channel for any amount of time you know that we don't normally do product reviews or gadget type reviews on our channel that's just not something we've ever really gotten into doing we've done a couple we've done a couple but only if they're products that we really feel are a benefit to our homestead right but recently Kevin's mom bought an air fryer and she's been calling us and calling us and telling us that we need to get an air fryer and you know I just don't want another thing on the counter in the kitchen I'm not really into super gadgety types of things so I wasn't sold but then we got an email right so we got an email from a company who makes air fryers it was kind of the perfect timing and so they offered to send us an air fryer to try and so we told them that we would try it only because I was hoping it would get my mom off my back it also just happened to be perfect timing because like I said out in the garden this is really the only time of year we eat fried food here on the homestead so about two weeks ago we told this company to send us the air fryer to try now I spent a lot of time and say I'm kind of good at negotiating with people so I told them we were only willing to try one if they gave a discount to you guys and if they would supply us with one to give away as a freebie to one of you as a contest and they agreed to do both so they sent just the air fryer about two weeks ago and we've been playing around with it ever since the air fryer that we're testing out is called pin soon it's a 10 quart air fryer and like I said we've had it for about two weeks now and we actually fell in love with it it does such a great job today we're going to show you what we have figured out to make this thing work now I want to talk with you a little bit just real quickly about how we're actually using this air fryer differently than I think most people do when they get an air fryer these air fryers will fry things from the grocery store in the frozen section like tater tots chicken nuggets french fries those kinds of things that you buy from the grocery store and you know you throw them in the air fryer and they make them taste amazing well we don't cook like that we don't buy anything from the freezer section at the grocery store so we wanted to find a way to make this work for us when we use our deep fryer the few times a year that we do we always you know you know go through the breading process and everything we do in that way is homemade so we wanted to see if these air fryers would work on things that are breaded and fried at home right yeah it's one thing to be able to dump a bag of chicken nuggets in it and have it cook it I have no doubt that it's capable of doing that but like Sarah said can you take home grown food and actually make it work for that as well that's what we've been playing around with and we figured out how to do it and we're so happy to share it with you guys so let's get started chopping up all of these vegetables and I'll show you how I figured out the best ready to put breading on these for the air fryer [Music] so when we first started making the majority of our food homemade we wanted to learn how to bread items how to put bread crumbs on things and actually make them stick we wanted to make our own chicken nuggets we wanted to make our own you know vegetables and things like that they had breading on them but we always had a problem with the breading just falling off so after years of trial and error I finally figured out a way to make it stick on the vegetables and I'm going to share that with you today it's nothing big there's no huge secret to it let me show you what we do we're use some organic all-purpose flour and I'm just gonna put some right on top of the veggies a pretty good amount then I'm gonna just use my hands to mix all of the vegetables around to make sure that they're well coated in the flour the reason that most breadcrumbs and other things don't stick to vegetables very well especially okra is because the vegetables are too wet there's too much moisture in them so the key to making these stick is to make sure that they're very very dry when you go to put your breadcrumbs on so what I'm going to do is I'm going to leave these in here with this flour for just about a minute or two then I'm gonna add a little more flour and do this again then I'm going to transfer them to a cookie sheet and we're gonna let them sit with the flour on them for at least 10 minutes maybe a little more before we add before we start breading them I'll show you that step when we get to that all right I'm gonna let these sit for a minute and then we'll add more flour all right just a little bit more flour stir them around again and I will transfer them to a cookie sheet now the peppers the flower is only going to really stick to the inside of the peppers where the skin is there's not going to be a lot of flower sticking but that's okay it seems to still work out good in the end so we're gonna just let these sit here on the cookie sheet for 10 minutes and then we'll get ready to bread them so what we're using is three eggs with what I like to call a glug of milk or just you know a tiny bit of milk out of the jug whisk that together to make it a little bit thinner and then we're going to use bread crumbs with salt about 1 teaspoon of salt per cup of bread crumbs so that's what we're gonna be using next after the eggs why are we adding salt to the bread crumbs because we're not using oil to fry these in so when they come out of the airfryer there's no oil on them for the salt to stick so it just like bounces right off so we added the salt to the bread crumbs and that fixed the problem right ok so we found that out from trial and error because that's the good part about taking these out of a deep fryer is they're so nice and greasy that there's something for the salt to stick to but this didn't happen in this case but this made it so much better all right so I'm gonna start by just putting some of the vegetables into the egg mix them around until they're coated and then I'll transfer them over in the breadcrumbs now you do want to get some of the loose flour off if you can so I like to put them into the egg with my hands and then we'll just mix them around with a slotted spoon until you can see that all of the vegetables are covered in egg and then kind of take them out I like to use a slotted spoon because you want as much of that egg to drain back off as you can that will put them into the breadcrumbs and we're going to toss these around and make sure that they're all evenly coated with the breadcrumbs before we take them out and put them on the next cookie sheet now if you need more egg or more breadcrumbs as you go just add some and wing it with the salt right we don't like to waste ingredients so we do a little bit at a time and add as we need to this is also a good exercise for working together it's called marital bliss so they're all breaded we're gonna start loading up this basket now this basket can hold everything that we've just breaded in different layers I'm gonna put one layer on the bottom kind of a single layer and then I'm gonna spray it with just a little bit of spray oil now we have one of those pump sprayers but it just broke so we found some spray coconut oil that we're gonna be using okay so I have one single layer and I'm going to spray just a light layer of this oil on to the veggies this will make them nice and golden brown and still give a little bit of the flavor of the fat that you taste in fried food okay I'm gonna put the rest of these I think and one other layer one thing you'll find with using these air fryers is that it takes a little bit more time than if you were just going to put one batch in a deep fryer but in a deep fryer generally you can fry this amount of food all at once so I think in the end it works itself out [Music] okay let's get the fryer ready okay so here is the airfryer this is actually a pretty nice size air fryer but it doesn't take up a whole lot of room on the counter which is nice it opens up just like this but right now what we're going to do is we're going to turn it on and we have found for that for things like veggies the french fries setting actually works really well except we don't use the full amount of time so I turn it on I'm going to hit the french fry setting which is going to put it on 400 degrees we're going to hit the power button again which will actually get it heating up and then we're gonna put the basket of veggies inside to put the basket in we put one of the shelves down here on the bottom and then the basket goes right on top this handle comes out and we close it up and it's starting to fry know what we like to do is we we let it run for five minutes at 400 degrees then we take the basket out we shake the vegetables around we'll spray a little more of the spray oil on and then put it back in for another five minutes and usually that's just about right if it needs just a few more minutes after that we'll put it back in for just a couple more minutes so while these vegetables are in frying I want to show you just a couple of the other things that come with this when you buy it I'll be honest we haven't played around with all of them yet our main concern was trying to recreate deep frying the vegetables but it comes with three of the shelves that go inside the unit these can actually be used also to dehydrate things this can be used as a dehydrator which is really nice it also comes with this basket which opens up and you can put like french fries inside of here and then it'll actually spin around inside the fryer to cook everything nice and evenly now the inside rod here comes out and you can add these little Spears so that you can use it as a rotisserie as well you guys have seen the chickens that we raise here on the homestead they're too big for this but if you had a little bit smaller chicken it would be great and I might actually try it for some quail I think that would be good as well so there's a lot of things that you can do with this we haven't played around with all of them yet like I said our main concern was just trying to deep fry some veggies from the garden it's been five minutes so I'm going to open this and take them out and just shake them up a little bit reattach the handle to the basket so I'm going to bring them over here to on top of this cookie sheet to shake them the first time Kevin did it he shook them over the floor and all of the breadcrumbs fell on the floor that wasn't cool so this who won't we've come up with so shake them around flip them and then we're gonna spray them again with just a light coating of the cooking spray we're gonna put them back in take the handle off again and close it up and it will resume we're gonna do this for another five minutes I do want to mention to you guys that when kevin told me about this an opportunity to get this airfryer I was completely against it I am NOT a gadget girl I don't want things on my counter I feel like I can cook everything that we need with what we already have Kevin's one of those guys it's like a light night TV as seen on tv gadget kind of guy and I am totally not but it convinced me to try this and I do think it's working out really well for us a couple things that I don't like about deep frying that this kind of completely replaces is obviously the large volume of oil that we need to buy at the store it's getting harder and harder for us to find affordable non-gmo type oils at the grocery store especially in bulk I buy groceries every four to six weeks and when we need oil I want to buy a big enough amount that will last us a while not a little bit here and there I don't buy corn oil canola oil soybean oil so we're looking for you know sunflower oil or something like that and it's just harder and harder for me to find that at a reasonable price and I'm not finding those things at Walmart at all anymore but also the fryer itself it's messy we normally do all of our frying outside it's hot outside so this air fryer has kind of taken care of a lot of the mess and the hassle with all the oil and the deep fryer so just a couple more minutes and we'll check on them again they might even be done all right spend another five minutes let's check on them I think they're just about done you can see that they're nice and golden-brown let's shake them around here one more time I think I'm going to just put them back in for a couple more minutes I'd say maybe two more minutes and I think they'll be done this was a pretty big batch so you kind of have to judge based on how many you're putting in let's give him two more minutes all right I think these are done let's check on them and take them out I think those look perfect we're gonna cut it and put them on a plate now I warn you that just like when you deep fry things these are super hot when they come out so you're gonna want want to let them rest for a little while before you eat them typically I'm not very patient sorry the first one I eat normally burns my mouth but after that they're pretty darn good so there you'll look how delicious those look I think they look just as good as deep-fried but it really comes down to how they taste so we're gonna give them a try I'm gonna start with banana pepper I'm gonna start with okra because the okra arm that's like what summer is all about mmm that's good and I'm not a pain yo I really think that having the spray oil to put on them makes a big difference when we tried them with no oil at all yeah we're dry yeah they were just lacking something but with the spray oil it makes a very big difference they needed a little fat and that coconut oil spray did it really well I need a little fat I'm sure any of the spray oils would do really well I need more of that but the real key is gonna be let's see if this made Sarah like fried okra I'm nervous here's a nice crunchy one can I put some ranch on it sure ranch fixes everything I'm actually like barbecue sauce on them no I know that's kind of weird now the fried part is good and like before the flavor of okra is good but I still don't like the slime eNOS well looks like I get all of the okra then I'll take all of the peppers no if you want so what an awesome alternative to fried food it's still tastes amazing and you can make these homemade from vegetables from your garden right now I feel like I can have fried okra like every day or twice a day at least twice a day yeah yeah and not feel as guilty as I did when I was deep-frying it so that's a bonus because if any of you have ever grown okra you know that once it starts to produce it's like you're picking okra every single day you guys don't forget that there is a discount code if you're interested in buying this through Amazon that's where it will be available will put the discount code for 15% off right in the description box below and we'll tag a comment as soon as we get up in the morning we'll tag a comment that has that on there 15% off but also don't forget that we're giving one of these away so one of these will be sent to the home of the winner in order to qualify what they need to do you need to be first of all you need to be in the United States it's gonna ship from Amazon in the United States you also need to leave a comment on this video and then next Saturday we'll be picking a winner the video will come out next Sunday announcing who the winner is so make sure to comment below to enter into our giveaway you guys I hope you enjoyed this video I hope you enjoyed learning how to make some more healthy fried veggies from the garden if you're not a subscriber yet and you enjoy what we're doing here make sure you subscribe below and share this video so other people can be entered into the contest and share our channel with people who are like-minded and until next time thank you so much for stopping by the homestead take care and God bless god bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 183,746

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing, air fryer, pinsoon air fryer, air fried okra, air fried peppers, air fried green tomatoes, air fried green peppers, air fried green peas

Id: OZHGvk1UA1s

Length: 22min 54sec (1374 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 06 2019