Fried Green Tomatoes

Jon Avnet's Fried Green Tomatoes opens with Jessica Tandy in a nursing home, which is where she ended up in Driving Miss Daisy. But the similarity ends there. Fried Green Tomatoes, which Fanny Flagg adapted from her novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, is not another gentle pouring of Southern comfort. The film, released in 1991, three years before Tandy's death, is a clear-eyed celebration of the power of friendship. Tandy plays an 82-year-old woman who would rather live with her memories than deal with the present.

Green tomatoes are generally not a consideration for cooks and gardeners in our area until October. The unripened fruit is seldom marketed in groceries, although some farmstands may accommodate customer requests. This year, however, those nursing tomato plants in the backyard are getting frustrated waiting for their tomatoes to ripen on the vine. And the harvests at U-pick farms are faring no better. Although a sunny windowsill, a brown paper bag or a wrapping of newspaper may force some ripening of green tomatoes to an acceptable red color, the taste will never be the same as tomatoes ripened on the vine.

We hope we are on the road to Juliette, Ga. We have starved ourselves since last night, and we're set to dine on some good old fried green tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. You'd think there would be tons of signs - "This Exit!" "Don't Miss It!" "Made Famous by the Movie!" Nothing. We had better not be disappointed. Surely that woman in Macon wasn't pulling our leg? She was the one who told us this was the road to Juliette, the tiny town deep in the heart of Dixie that played host to stars and crews filming the hit movie Fried Green Tomatoes.

The recipe for Fried Green Tomatoes calls for ingredients that usually make for an unappetizing meal of Southern grit, if not the screen equivalent of a culinary disaster. We are once again in the milieu of Steel Magnolias and Driving Miss Daisy - a world with a surface as placid as a fishing hole at midnight. Beneath the courtliness, men are often jerks and worse and women are decidedly not glad for it. The lineage of Fried Green Tomatoes is even established in its opening, which finds Jessica Tandy in a nursing home - the place where she ended up in Driving Miss Daisy.

While most of us are waiting around for those juicy red orbs to ripen on the vine, others are rejoicing when they can pick them green. Green tomatoes, sliced, dusted with cornmeal, and pan-fried, are a much anticipated summer treat for lots of folks, especially those with roots in the South, where fried green tomatoes are a staple. Vendors at farmers markets are selling green tomatoes now. Look for them if you want to fry up a batch or even use them in green tomato jam. If you've never made fried green tomatoes before, here is a recipe to get you started:   Fried Green Tomatoes 1. Cut out the stem ends from the tomatoes and slice them 1/4-inch thick; reserve.

During the telecast of this year's Ultimate Game, many women were not hiding in the kitchen, chilling six-packs and preparing bean dip for their Super Bowl-entranced husbands. They were at the movies, watching a metaphorical war between two different representations of motherhood, or a parable of feminism filtered through the colorful relationship of two Depression-era women. During the weekend of the big game, ticket sales of "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" and "Fried Green Tomatoes" surged - to $13 million - leaving them No. 1 and No. 2 at the box office.

That box-office comet, "Wayne's World," hurled off a challenge from the new Sylvester Stallone comedy "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot" over the weekend. In its second week of release, the "Saturday Night Live" spinoff remained at the top with another $11.8 million worth of ticket sales. The rock 'n' roll comedy's 10-day total is an excellent $33.5 million. Meanwhile, "Stop!" - in which Stallone's tough cop is taken down by a visit from his interfering mother (Estelle Getty of "The Golden Girls")

The woman waiting for me at a New York restaurant bore little resemblance to the photograph of Fannie Flagg on the jacket of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. In the photograph, she had an old-fashioned ho-hum prettiness; in real life, with red hair no longer swept back in soft waves, but standing up in spikes, she looked modern and amusing. "You've written yourself quite a book," I said as soon as I sat down. "Do you really think so?" she asked, as pleased and excited as a child receiving a compliment on a picture colored with crayons.

The historic downtown strip of Medford, a quaint Victorian village on the fringes of the Pinelands, is about the last place I expected to encounter a "hey y'all!" bowl of Louisiana gumbo. But there it was the other night, steaming "ya-ya" style around a scoop of rice, with tender morsels of chicken bumping up against smoky moons of andouille sausage in a spice-tingled broth turned chestnut brown by patiently darkened roux. That it was served in a trendy square bowl is a small soul concession to the striving elegance of Ted's on Main, the year-and-a-half-old bistro where I was eating.

In Memoirs of an Invisible Man, sometimes the audience can see Chevy Chase and sometimes - as when Chinese food is shown gurgling through his digestive system - it can't. "You can't have a star like Chevy Chase in a picture and then just use his voice-over," explains John Carpenter, who finally turned H.F. Saint's 1987 bestseller into celluloid. "It was a difficult point-of-view problem," says the director. "I had to find the scenes in the story that I thought could support having Chevy visible on screen.

While most of us are waiting around for those juicy red orbs to ripen on the vine, others are rejoicing when they can pick them green. Green tomatoes, sliced, dusted with cornmeal, and pan-fried, are a much anticipated summer treat for lots of folks, especially those with roots in the South, where fried green tomatoes are a staple. Vendors at farmers markets are selling green tomatoes now. Look for them if you want to fry up a batch or even use them in green tomato jam. If you've never made fried green tomatoes before, here is a recipe to get you started:   Fried Green Tomatoes 1. Cut out the stem ends from the tomatoes and slice them 1/4-inch thick; reserve.

The historic downtown strip of Medford, a quaint Victorian village on the fringes of the Pinelands, is about the last place I expected to encounter a "hey y'all!" bowl of Louisiana gumbo. But there it was the other night, steaming "ya-ya" style around a scoop of rice, with tender morsels of chicken bumping up against smoky moons of andouille sausage in a spice-tingled broth turned chestnut brown by patiently darkened roux. That it was served in a trendy square bowl is a small soul concession to the striving elegance of Ted's on Main, the year-and-a-half-old bistro where I was eating.

The cobalt-blue dining room was a bossa nova blur of fruit-printed swimwear. Our eyes widened when the model stopped beside our table and swept back her sheer wrap. "Do you like anything you see?" We had come for a dinner of haute soul, but stumbled into a trunk show in progress: "Brazilian Bathing Suits for American Women. " Judging from the spangled Post-It of a bathing suit that clung to the model before us, I'd say there wasn't much fabric in the trunk at all. "More Cuban toast, please?"

Jon Avnet's Fried Green Tomatoes opens with Jessica Tandy in a nursing home, which is where she ended up in Driving Miss Daisy. But the similarity ends there. Fried Green Tomatoes, which Fanny Flagg adapted from her novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, is not another gentle pouring of Southern comfort. The film, released in 1991, three years before Tandy's death, is a clear-eyed celebration of the power of friendship. Tandy plays an 82-year-old woman who would rather live with her memories than deal with the present.

Green tomatoes are generally not a consideration for cooks and gardeners in our area until October. The unripened fruit is seldom marketed in groceries, although some farmstands may accommodate customer requests. This year, however, those nursing tomato plants in the backyard are getting frustrated waiting for their tomatoes to ripen on the vine. And the harvests at U-pick farms are faring no better. Although a sunny windowsill, a brown paper bag or a wrapping of newspaper may force some ripening of green tomatoes to an acceptable red color, the taste will never be the same as tomatoes ripened on the vine.

We hope we are on the road to Juliette, Ga. We have starved ourselves since last night, and we're set to dine on some good old fried green tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. You'd think there would be tons of signs - "This Exit!" "Don't Miss It!" "Made Famous by the Movie!" Nothing. We had better not be disappointed. Surely that woman in Macon wasn't pulling our leg? She was the one who told us this was the road to Juliette, the tiny town deep in the heart of Dixie that played host to stars and crews filming the hit movie Fried Green Tomatoes.

Just as location, location and location are real estate's words to live by, so has service, service, service become the byword of America's restaurant industry. But as customers know, there can be a sizable chasm between a restaurant's good intentions and what actually happens in the dining room. That's why I was impressed with how Mick's Downstairs at the Bellevue dealt with a recent problem-plagued lunch. Appetizers and entrees arrived together. A burger ordered medium-rare was raw inside.

If you're looking for moderately priced food in a neat and classy environment, check out Mick's, the new eatery in the subway level of the Bellevue where the Broadway Deli used to reside. Mick's is definitely the land of Gulliver-sized portions and Lilliputian prices. The fare features sandwiches, lots of appetizers, salads, pastas, platters, nightly specials and desserts. What's really nice is that this part of town can use a restaurant of this type. It's basically family-oriented and offers creative American-style menu items with attention to value.

During the telecast of this year's Ultimate Game, many women were not hiding in the kitchen, chilling six-packs and preparing bean dip for their Super Bowl-entranced husbands. They were at the movies, watching a metaphorical war between two different representations of motherhood, or a parable of feminism filtered through the colorful relationship of two Depression-era women. During the weekend of the big game, ticket sales of "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" and "Fried Green Tomatoes" surged - to $13 million - leaving them No. 1 and No. 2 at the box office.

In Memoirs of an Invisible Man, sometimes the audience can see Chevy Chase and sometimes - as when Chinese food is shown gurgling through his digestive system - it can't. "You can't have a star like Chevy Chase in a picture and then just use his voice-over," explains John Carpenter, who finally turned H.F. Saint's 1987 bestseller into celluloid. "It was a difficult point-of-view problem," says the director. "I had to find the scenes in the story that I thought could support having Chevy visible on screen.