Omnomicon

When I was a kid we visited my Uncle Doug with some frequency, and he only owned two movies from what I can remember. The first was The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, which didn’t appeal to me for more than five minutes at a time, and the second was Fried Green Tomatoes. Yes, it is a chick flick, but it’s also a dark period film, and at the time that shit was directly up my alley. Oh, who are we kidding, it’s still up my alley.

In college, I took a food lit class and this was also on the required reading. Turns out in the book there’s a little bit more of a lesbian bent. Who knew? Whatever the case, I digress. It all comes down to I saw green tomatoes at work, and decided to try something new. In addition to the food itself, check out the results of my fancy little light box!

Look at these babies. Just beautiful, the color.

Green being my favourite colour, this was practically a religious experience visually.

This isn’t sandart, it’s just the underwhelming breading for these things.

And here they are, fried green tomatoes!

These were really just okay, which surprises me in a way, considering how much oil went into them, but not in other ways, like it’s a southern dish. I could see these being excellent with seasoned breadcrumbs, but I’m not a big fan of cornmeal without something punching it up a bit, and needless to say, the tsp of paprika really didn’t cut it. That said, I made an attempt to salvage this experiment.

Yep, you can make anything into a pretty good sammich. This one features arugula, cheddar, red onion, and mayo. My research tells me that green tomatoes are indeed just red tomatoes that haven’t had a chance to ripen yet. I thought maybe they were some kind of varietal. Maybe I’ll try fried heirloom tomatoes one of these days.

If you are interested in making your own, here’s a recipe from Epicurious.