Thursday, October 29, 2015

My favorite thing to do with the abundance of green tomatoes at the end of the season

My family loves fried green tomatoes.  And we sure miss them all winter long.   A few years ago I tired an experiment that worked perfectly to give us this special treat in the dead of winter.  I'm going to tell you how to make up these green tomatoes to keep in the freezer and fry up when wanted.
       
First you need the green tomatoes.  At the sign of our first frost I dash out and pick all the tomatoes left in the garden.  

Now you need to slice them and I use a mandoin slicer to make fast work of the job.

Now because they will be frozen you HAVE to blanch them.  You need to bring water to a boil and drop them in and leave them for 1 minute and then pull them out and put in to ice water.  Blanching stops the action of the fruit ripening any farther so make sure you do this step!

Now you are ready to coat them in your flour seasoning mix.  I grew up just using flour, salt and pepper.  Some folks like to add in corn meal.  Just use what ever you normally use.  
Now layer them on trays.  I found that lining the tray with plastic wrap really helped to remove them after frozen.  I've tried using just the tray and I've used foil, wax paper and they all were hard to remove the frozen tomatoes.  Plastic wrap was easily lifted and I wa able to remove the tomatoes easily.  
Now that I have these into the freezer I will wrap the rest in newspaper and let them slowly ripen in our basement.  I save these treats for after the holidays.  By January winter is begining to feel to long and thats when I fry the first of these up as a side dish for dinner.  
They taste just like they came from the garden and are a wonderful treat as we wait for winter to pass.

Blessing to you and hope you will enjoy this specail treat too!
Cherlynn
brchbell@yahoo.com