Small towns, neighbors, the innernetz, learning things and culinary delights

Courtesy of Paula Deen

One of the advantages of living in a small town is your neighbors. They frequently do the nicest things, just because they're your neighbor. And vice versa. We don't have enough open property space to plant a garden. Lots of flowery stuff here and there, but no veggies.

Some of our neighbors have gardens. We've been the grateful recipients of potatoes, lettuce, tomatoes, radishes, herbs and sweet corn. The other day one of our nice ladies down the street was clearing out her assorted crops and getting the dirt ready for next growing season. Included in what she kindly brought us was some green tomatoes.

Anybody growing up in the South knows about and has eaten Fried Green Tomatoes. (yep, just like the movie title) My Mama dipped 'em in corn meal, fried 'em, added salt and pepper and served. No big deal. (like most Southern food) Worth every minute of her time. (like most Southern food)

Being an innernetz nut and big-time Paula Deen fan, I decided to find out what she might suggest. O.M.G. She doesn't use corn meal and she suggests a Vidalia relish topping. I'd never heard of such a recipe so I studied on it a while.

We don't keep self-rising flour on hand, so I decided I'd use the all-purpose that is on hand. We don't have, and can't get, Vidalia onions this time of year. But, I remembered, there is a Vidalia salad dressing. Since I'd never tried it I figured this would be a good time to. Off to one of our two grocery stores I went.

I'm happy to report: my version was tasty. Not great, but worth repeating. The new addition to our assortment of salad dressings now includes Vidalia. It's quite tasty. I'm thinking how good it's going to be on a green salad, or a mixed-meat, cheese, lettuce, tomato, hoagie bun sammich. I'm anticipating.

My result wasn't worthy of a picture, but Paul's is, so I did the "save as," "upload" things.