Garden Goodies

My garden turned out beautifully this year but that's a whole other post.  

Over the weekend we went to a community yard sale and came across a friend who told us to go raid his garden as it was being destroyed this week to make room for a project.  

Raid I did!  

To the tune of almost a bushel of plump ripe Roma tomatoes!  

I came home and promptly got to work on making some homemade Pizza sauce and some tomato sauce.  That is a post for another day but it's coming.

Today it's all about the treasures that lay beneath the maters

 These baby's right here!  See those firm bright green tomatoes?  Yup they're gonna be fried up for dinner!  Since I'm the only one who eats them I really didn't need 4 of them but...I rescued them from the treads of a dozer.  That makes me a Veggie Hero...yea, I'll go with that.  This small jewel toned beauty of an eggplant was what I needed to push me over the edge and do some frying.  Typically I stay away from frying things but some things just need to take a swim in hot oil! 

I sliced up my eggplant and salted them to draw out the moisture and bitterness and left them sit for a while as I gathered my other stuff.  I sliced the tomatoes all up and started looking for my breadcrumbs.

What?  No breadcrumbs?  Story of my life.

What I did have was frozen dried cubes of old baguettes so I pulled them out, put them in my mini-food processor and whirled them together with some fresh dried (as in from my garden) basil and garlic powder and made my own damn breadcrumbs.

For the next hour I floured, egg-washed, breaded and fried piles of eggplant and green tomatoes!

 

I know what you're thinking...geeze chic, that's a big ole pile of fried stuff...but this pile will get me through a long cold winter!  After eating my fill of both which is really about 2 slices of each I froze them.  The eggplant will be layered with sauce and cheese for Eggplant Parmesan and because I'm the only one who will eat it, I can just make small portions rather then a whole pan that gets half thrown away.

The fried green tomatoes were coated with a mixture of the breadcrumbs and some fish fry coating I had a little left of.  It added that little extra crunch to them..so yummy!  You can see the different textures the coatings produce. 

Fried eggplant is just so amazing, it makes me happy. 

With all that fried stuff I didn't dare fry dinner too so I baked chicken strips using the breadcrumbs I just made and with SF's favorite, some mac & cheese (cheap ole box of Mac & Cheese is his favorite...gotta love an easy Hubby) we called it dinner!