When I bought all those tomatoes to do my canning, they came straight from the farmers selling them to grocery stores, which means they came to me green. I put them out on the back porch in the sunshine to ripen up, and after a few days they turned gorgeous red and I set to work turning them into marinara sauce. But there were still a couple of tomatoes that refused to ripen along with the rest of them, so I took advantage of it and made one of my favorite Southern comfort foods.
This is one of those simple home cookin’ kind of recipes that doesn’t require measurements, you just slap it all together as you go and you can’t go wrong.
Fried Green Tomatoes
Green tomatoes, sliced into thick rounds
milk
flour
eggs
cornmeal
bacon
Fry up your bacon and get all that great fat out. Set the bacon aside and keep all that bacon fat in the pan. Bread your tomatoes. Set up four plates full of your breading ingredients – milk, flour, eggs, and cornmeal – then dunk your tomato steaks in them in that order, alternating the wet and dry ingredients. First in the milk, then in the flour, then in the eggs, and finally in the cornmeal. Fry up in the bacon fat until the breading is good and crispy.
I like to serve my tomatoes with the bacon crumbled on top and a nice fresh ranch dressing. This time I decided to stick with the green theme and make a parsley ranch.
1 C cream
1 C mayo
1 C parsley
2 T lemon juice
1 tsp salt
Mix all the ingredients up in a blender or food processor and stick in the fridge to chill for a couple of hours before serving.
This time of year there are still a few stragglers on the tomato vines that never quite caught up to harvest time. This is a delicious homey comfort food that uses up those little tomatoes that don’t seem to make it to their full potential.
That looks absolutely delicious! I need to get back to more creative cooking.