Friday, January 11, 2008

Country Supper

Not long ago Lib was talking about how she was going to cook up all sorts of good food and freeze it, then when she didn't have time to cook a big meal she could just take something out and thaw it for supper. Good idea, huh?

I have to point out here that in mine and Lib's neck of the wood, we have breakfast, dinner and supper. Up north they have breakfast, lunch and dinner. When I lived up north I always thought their dinner looked more like our lunch!! They ate a lot lighter than we do down here in the hills!!

One of the foods Lib was preparing to freeze was meatloaf. Then I kept hearing Karen talk about making her famous buttermilk cornbread and I would be drooling. Almost daily I visit Sandi over at the Whistlestop Cafe Cooking blog and what do I see staring me in the face every day when I go there? Check it out...fried green tomatoes...right there on her header!!

What's a hillbilly girl, with thoughts of all this good country cookin' dancing around in her head, going to do? As a general rule I don't like to cook, but sometimes there is only one place to get good foods like these girls made and that's to cook it yourself!!

Last night I could stand it no longer and had to have meatloaf so I made one and stuck it in the oven to bake. You know, don't you, that if you have meatloaf you have to have mashed potatoes (mashed taters) to go with that and I do make some pretty good mashed taters if I do say so myself! :)

mashed potatoes

It just so happened that this past summer we grew some tomatoes right here in our own back yard. We had to water them faithfully every day because we had no rain here but we had a good crop right up until cool weather was coming. I decided rather than let the frost get the green ones I would try putting some of them in the freezer. I had never tried this method before or any method for that matter but I remember my mother canning green tomatoes. She would open a can and fry them up when we had snow on the ground and it tasted like summertime heaven! Even though I knew the canning was a tried and true method I wasn't equipped for it so I put mine in the freezer.

What could possibly go any better with meatloaf and mashed potatoes than fried green tomatoes? So I took some out of the freezer and fried them up:

fried green tomatoes

Not bad at all. Not exactly the same as fresh ones but close. If you know anything at all about country cookin' then you know that no meal is complete without a pone of cornbread. So I dragged out my cast iron skillet, greased it up and made some cornbread!

Corn bread

Up north they say the presentation of food is the most important thing. Down here in the country, we say it's the taste. Since you only have my bad photography to go by and I'm not big on presentation, you'll just have to take my word that it was good. Can't you just feel your arteries clogging as you look at the picture??

Country Supper 1