I love fried green tomatoes. Hi Brad. Yours look great, but I've always just used seasoned flour, the same as I use for fried eggplant or chicken. The key is have the tomatoes, eggplant or chicken nice and wet and it will take a nice amount of flour. I do shake them off, so you're just using the flour stuck to them. Then a good hot pan with a little bit of oil in it. The tomatoes and eggplant fry up quite fast, especially the green tomatoes so by time flour is nice and brown the tomatoes are certainly done. Karen they don't stay crisp for a real long time but same as fried eggplant they stay for a while. I season the flour with a decent amount of salt, onion powder and garlic powder.

It's still very cold here, and we have over a foot of snow on the ground. I just though of...Hot Chocolate! (No marshmallows, and made from scratch with Droste's cocoa, sugar and whole milk.) Some shortbread cookies wouldn't be amiss. I hear you on the grilled cheese sandwiches. Of course they have to be cooked on a nice greasy grill to qualify as comforting. Ah, nothing like cholesterol to satiate you. Did I ever mention my one claim to health? I have astounding cholesterol levels. My MD is terribly impressed. If I could find a way to take the *caolries* out of this stuff or to distribute the fat somewhere other than my middle...I could eat it all every day!

some of my fav's still around include hamburgers at Redamaks in New Buffalo MI and yes I do drive to MI from Chicago just for their hamburgers LOL. We used to have a summer place in New Buffalo MI and that place is THE place to go for lunch & dinner. I still always visit Teibels in Schereville IN when in NW IN seeing friends, I always have the Walleye grilled. My DH makes us stop at Zel's for barbeque sandwiches & plain pulled pork in Hammond IN and Schoops for hamburgers - he won't drive to MI LOL. House of Pizza in Hammond IN when I'm in the mood for square cut, thin pizza. A few fav's long gone include Puntillo's Restaurant, growing up we used to eat fish (either lake perch or breaded cod) there every Friday, they closed up in the mid 80's :-( Ralphs Pizza we used to get pizza delivered on Sat nite or Sundays for Cubs or Bears games when I was little. There was also an awesome DQ around the corner from my house, we used to bug my dad to walk over there and get us a bag of dilly bars in the summer, when we were too little to go by ourselves LOL. Food was very different back then, I rarely find a place to go out to eat that is as good as the restaurants I grew up with :-( ~ liz

Scott, There is no smell like ANY peppers roasting! Truly! If I was trying to sell a house, I'd have peppers and tomatoes dehydrating or roasting in the oven just to fill the house with that delicious aroma. I think a house would sell based on how good it smelled! I miss frying! I miss making home-made fried chicken and chicken fried steaks as well as fried pork chops, and fried potatoes, or my dad's summer garden dish where he'd mix together sliced potatoes, okra, onions and peppers (hot or sweet) and fry them in lard or bacon fat, sprinkling a handful or two of cornmeal over them as he fried them. We never had a name for that dish but I loved to make it, and it too has been relegated to the more fattening meals of our past and no longer is included in the healthier meals of the present day. Tim has high cholesterol, though, so frying things in the old southern style is something we dropped almost entirely at least 15 years ago. Homemade fried chicken still is a favorite birthday meal here in this household, and I'll make it if that's what the birthday person wants. I think that on their birthday a person should get to eat what they want. If you're eating healthy most of the time, an occasional old-style fried southern meal won't hurt. Stockergal, Well, I grew up on meat and potatoes, growing up in Fort Worth a few miles from the Stockyards. Beef was always the main thing we had when I was a kid, but we did have lots of chicken and occasionally pork or fish. It is just that when you live in a Wild West sort of town like Ft. Worth (I am sure OKC was very similar in the same decades) where beef and potatoes are the holy grail of meals, that's what you eat. I'd still rather eat meat and potatoes than anything else, but we do try to eat more fish and poultry now and less red meat. My first job was as a waitress in a steakhouse and I would have eaten steak every day if I could. It has been hard to slowly (way too slowly, most likely) learn to eat in a more healthy manner. Carol, As soon as I saw "hobo dinners", I did instantly think "Boy Scouts!" That's some good eating, and I love hobo dinners. I also love cooking anything/everything outdoors in cast iron dutch ovens, also a remnant, I guess, from our Boy Scout days. Andria, Well, you made me hungry! We do cook a lot less in the heat. I love it when cold weather returns in fall or winter and find myself spending a lot more time in the kitchen then (coincidentally at a time when I am spending less time in the garden). I find eating healthy works best for me one day at a time. (grin) If I had to think that I'd only eat perfectly healthy meals for the rest of my life, I'd rebel and go buy and eat the biggest ribeye I could find, and then I'd finish the meal with incredibly rich and delicious homemade (made from scratch) chocolate cake. An occasional cheat day isn't too bad, but we truly are eating healthier than we ever have, most days. We are trying really hard to eat healthier as we get older, and it isn't always easy. The taste buds want what they want, but I do think that once I cut a lot of junk out of my diet, I don't enjoy it as much when I do eat some of it because my taste buds have learned to enjoy things that are less fattening, less processed, less salty, etc. I suppose that's a good thing, but I miss the days when I was younger and had better metabolism and could eat anything and everything I wanted and never gain an ounce. Those days are gone forever. If I ever find a way to grow my own chocolate, I'm in trouble. Dawn