One of my mother's favorite Depression-era recipes was her green tomato pie. We ate quite a lot of green tomatoes when I was a kid, usually in the fall, before the first freeze killed the vines. Now, gardening in Texas, I'm cutting back my spring tomatoes (seeded in January, transplanted in early April, bearing late May-early July), to encourage them to produce again in the fall. I still have ripe tomatoes, but quite a few green tomatoes too, and yesterday, I baked Mom's green tomato pie.
The pie begins with thin-sliced green tomatoes, peeled and cored (green tomatoes often have a crunchy core. Just for the heck of it, I added a couple of sliced zucchini. I sauteed the slices in butter, mixed them with lemon juice, sugar, salt, spices, and flour, and put them into an unbaked crust, topped with pastry. Bill (who generally prefers his tomatoes sauced and won't eat a
zucchini unless he doesn't know what it is) thought I had baked him an apple pie and enjoyed it so much that he ate two pieces.
Mom's Green Tomato Pie
3 1/2 c. peeled and sliced green tomatoes
3 tbsp. butter or margarine
6 tbsp. lemon juice
1 1/4 c. sugar
3 tbsp. flour
1/4 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1/4 tsp. cloves
Saute the tomatoes in the butter and lemon juice until just tender. Combine tomatoes with sugar, flour, salt and spices. Line 9" pie pan with pastry, pour in filling, dot with butter and cover with top crust. Bake at 450 degrees 10 minutes then reduce to 350 degrees and bake until crust is brown (about 35-40 minutes).
Book work. Hoping to wrap up The Tale of Oat Cake Crag today, at 89,000 words. If you've been following this project with me, you know that I began on May 4. I've taken some time off for book talks, shopping, and the ordinary stuff of life, and several days out because of the storm in early June, which knocked the power out. (This would not have bothered Beatrix, who wrote her books in pencil and ink in lined, bound notebooks.) All told, I have 62 days in the project, including five days for revisions. Which means I averaged a little more than 1400 words a day. I'm saying this to make a point: that if you write every day and if you stay with it long enough, you can manage a book-length project, or a collection of short stories, or a substantial journal. It's the dailiness that counts.
Tomorrow, I'm picking up another project. I'll tell you about it when tomorrow comes, so drop in again in the morning. I'm also spending some quality time over at Facebook, meeting new friends and book readers and enjoying the sense of community. Who said writing was a lonely business?
Reading note: If you want to write, if you want to create, you must . . . write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy head.--Ray Bradbury
