How Hard Can It Be?

Most of my kitchen adventures begin simply, but before I know it I’m on a full-blown quest. Usually, some little event, something innocuous and innocent, piques my curiosity.

Something like a one-pound green tomato.

In my final CSA box two Saturdays ago, among the mostly ripe red plum tomatoes was one giant green tomato. Jean didn’t want it, so I took it. I’ve heard of fried green tomatoes—I’ve probably even eaten them in the past, sometime while traveling through the South—so I thought to myself, “Fried green tomatoes—how hard can it be?”*

This past weekend, I asked Cate, who hails from Arkansas originally, if she had a family recipe for fried green tomatoes. But sadly, she didn’t. “Fried green tomatoes are more Deep South,” she explained. “They’re a Georgia thing. We were more of a Mid-South family.”

Hey, I’m a suburban brat from Boston. What do I know about such distinctions?

I checked in my go-to cookbooks—Joy of Cooking (1978 edition), Extending the Table, even my old mid-’70s Betty Crocker—but I turned up nothing. So off I trotted to the trusty Interwebs to see what I could find.

Two recipes caught my eye. The first was disarmingly simple and came from the “Southern Food” section of About.com. It called for dredging the tomato slices in salt and pepper and cornmeal, then frying them in bacon grease or oil. That sounded pretty authentically Southern to me, but I kept searching and found a batter-coated version on a blog called “Whistle Stop Cooking”—clearly banking on the full title of Fanny Flagg’s book (Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café). Turns out the blogger used to own and run the café that had previously been owned by Fanny Flagg’s aunt and that was, perhaps, the inspiration for the café in the book and film. Or perhaps not. (God knows they’re doing their best to make the marketing connection.) Whatever. The batter-style recipe sounded intriguing, so I opted to try it.

I made a small batch of the batter this morning—wheat flour, cornmeal, salt, pepper, and just enough milk to turn it into batter. I cut the tomato in half then cut one half into about six thick (half-inch, as the recipe directed) vertical slices. Luckily, I still had some bacon grease in the fridge from my Eggers bacon splurge over the weekend, so I used some of that combined with a bit of olive oil. (Gotta have some nod to healthfulness, after all.) I heated the fat in a heavy skillet, dipped the slices into the batter, and fried them till brown. The batter was thick but tasty, and the tomatoes cooked up tart and a bit juicy.

After sampling the first one, I decided to hold off on cooking the other half of the tomato—I think I’ll try the first, simpler recipe, along with cutting the tomato into thinner slices next time. But that left me with a dilemma: leftover batter. So I thought, hmm. What’s in the fridge?

First I cut a half-inch slice from a block of firm Small Planet tofu that I had on hand, dried the excess moisture on a paper towel, coated it in the batter, then added it to the pan. I’m thinking that cooking tofu in bacon grease is probably a mortal sin in somebody’s belief system—some Levitical text has got to be dead-set against it—but let me tell you, it was dang tasty.

I still had excess batter, however, so I giggled and thought: What else can I dip in batter and fry in bacon grease? I grabbed a thick carrot, peeled it, and cut it into slices about a quarter-inch thick. Into the batter, into the pan, and voila, another delicious treat.

By this time, even though there was still more batter in the bowl—and I had made a small batch, mind you—I felt my glee diminishing. I was tiring of the cooking process and felt ready to move on. So I cleaned everything up, while munching on the last of the carrots.

Lessons learned:

1. Just about anything is going to be incredibly delicious if dipped in batter and fried in bacon grease.
2. The sturdier the substrate (carrots, firm tofu), the better it will adhere to a relatively thick coating.
3. Green tomatoes are probably better when sliced thin, thus achieving a happier coating-to-interior ratio, so now I want to try the first recipe.
4. I get bored easily when the cooking process becomes repetitious. Monkey mind takes over. (I really need to practice my mindfulness in the kitchen, as elsewhere.)

* Footnote: “How hard can it be?” is a joke I share often with Cate. Sometime in our murky past, she uttered that line, and I quipped that it was the most dangerous sentence in the language—because it gives fools the justification they need for their latest foolish idea. But upon reflection, I amended my judgment. The most dangerous sentence is actually, “Hey, watch this!”—because that’s the fool taking action. And when you hear them in combination—“How hard can it be? Hey, watch this!”—well, stand back and wait for the flying debris to settle.