Fried Green Tomatoes From My Garden

1. Slice the tomatoes about 1/2 cm thick. (Vary this according to your success at frying the suckers!) Dip in cream, then in a mixture of bread crumbs and cheese --
about 50% each.

2. Heat about 50-65 ml olive oil in a large skillet or omelet pan until hot, but not smoking. NOTE TO THE NOVICE: Olive oil smokes easily! Saute' garlic until LIGHTLY browned. Ifyou overdo the garlic, or cook at too high a temperature, it will taste YUCKY! Remove the (oh, yeah....peeled and pureed) garlic from the oil and discard. Fry the tomato slices until crusty and lightly browned on each side. The tomatoes should be softened, but not mushy. You will probably find it necessary to make more batches of garlic oil from time to time, as you fry up the slices of green tomato. This is good.

3. You will finally toss all the (cooked) pasta with the remaining garlic-ky oil (there should be plenty of this!). If there is some cream left over, a LITTLE of this should go in too. Top with the fried tomato slices and a generous helping of shredded cheese and a little bit of bread crumbs.

Author's Notes: This recipe was made for me and my family by my uncle, Larry Ross, former advertising directory of Food & Wine and author of Nanny's Texas Table cookbook. The point is, this man is brilliant, and I'm proud to claim him as an uncle. Foodwise, that is. I could eat at his place for years. It's a little loose, and I've had more and less success with it at varying times, but this is the general idea. Most recently, I made it for my long-time girlfriend with a salmon mousse made with cream cheese topped with capers and lemon, and we ended up eating bites of the mousse with the green tomato/pasta. (Actually, we ended up doing something quite different, but culiNARily speaking....)

I also like to add some grated black pepper --
you should really invest in some very, very fresh peppercorns from a good