Fried Green Tomato Disaster...

There's a knitting blog I read everyday by a woman in California http://www.crazyauntpurl.com/ Laurie talks about a lot more than knitting, her cats, where she lives and what goes on in the life of a 30 something, recently divorced, very funny lady. I have cats, I'm single (and a lot older than Laurie, by the way) and I crochet. But this is probably my favorite blog to read every day. I keep thinking that since I have a son in Orange County the same age as Laurie, that I should be setting these two up. Neither one seems to be able to find someone they want to go out without, and after reading Laurie's blog for months, I think she would be perfect for him. That's another story, and mothers are supposed to stay out of their grown kids lives, no matter how tempting it is to tell them what I think they should do!

Okay, on to the reason for this! Yesterday, Laurie gave the recipe for fried green tomatoes, and it brought back a very funny memory from my younger years. Fried green tomatoes is a southern thing, and I live definitely in the north. I am English and German and live in the northern US. My mother's English heritage was lost long ago, her family has been here and everywhere in the US it seems, from what I've found out, since the mid 1600s. But Dad's family has only been in the US since the late 1800s, so we ate German when I was growing up. Lots of meat and potatoes, head cheese, pickled pig feet and other delicacies that I'd rather not think about.

I was around 20, working, when someone, with obviously southern heritage, talked about fried green tomatoes. I had never heard of them before! We ate red tomatoes out of the gardens, sliced with sugar or pepper and salt. My Dad, a farmer, had two gardens. The smaller house garden right outside the kitchen door for my Mother to take care of and grow lettuce, radishes, carrots and tomatoes. Then there was my Dad's big garden, usually somewhere around the buildings or on the edge of some field, where he grew sweet corn, potatoes, squash, pumpkins and more tomatoes.

By August, we had more tomatoes than we could ever consume in our lifetimes! Every year! My Dad's gardens were amazing. He stuck seeds and plants in the ground, or rather we kids stuck seeds and plants in the ground under Dad's supervision, and they grew like crazy. That's another story, one we won't get into here, about planting potatoes. If I never see another potato in my lifetime, I would be happy. Yuck! I hate planting potatoes!

Anyway..... I thought the idea of fried green tomatoes was great. It was something different, and I was so sick of the same food we ate day after day. Always meat and potatoes, vegtables, boiled beyond recognition, and always fresh tomatoes, at least in the two or three months that we northeners call summer.

So I got the recipe and made the one night for supper. They did not go over well! Everyone, except my brother, Bruce, who never ate anything at all, there's another story in that one, had one bite of a tomato, dipped in egg, rolled in cornmeal and fried. Salted and peppered, I wasn't that crazy about them either, but they weren't poison. According to my family, this was just one more of my crazy ideas and no one in their right mind would ever eat fried green tomatoes, and maybe this time, Shari was trying to poison them! The tomatoes got thrown out, and my Mother quickly cut up a dish of ripe, red tomatoes into slices, appearently to take the taste of fried tomatoes away.

I heard about the fried green tomato, poisoning my family, episode for years! It became one of the family stories that anyone who came along heard and laughed about. The time Shari tried to poison the entire family with fried green tomatoes! After that I quit cooking, at least for those ungrateful people I'm related to! Good thing too, since after all the ribbing I took, the poisoning thing didn't sound that bad!

My parents are gone now, but my sisters and brothers still remember the fried green tomatoes. I still hear about it now and then, not so much in the last few years since I don't see a whole lot of my siblings. But mention green tomatoes to any one of them, and I'm sure they will drag the whole thing up again!

When I saw Laurie's recipe for fried green tomatoes in her blog, it brought a lot of memories back, not very good ones, but even I can laugh about it now. But, the recipe she gave is the exact same one I used! If all these people from the southern states are eating fried green tomatoes, there can't be anything wrong with this, right? They must taste good if so many people are making and eating these all these years.

I am buying some tomato plants and growing them in my backyard. And when the tomatoes are green, I'm doing this again. I'm going to make fried green tomatoes exactly like Laurie's recipe. But this time I'm eating them all myself. My family now consists of daughter, Erica, who lives downstairs with her two daughters. I'm not feeding these to her. I know her eating habits, and there's no way I want a repeat performance of my younger years!