Gardens introduce kids to the magic of planting, growing, and interacting with elders at Sunshine Care Assisted Living Facility in Poway, CA. At this memory-care facility, children and seniors garden together in innovative ways that gives all ages and abilities a sense of purpose. Children plant, harvest and learn where their food comes from, and interact with people they might not otherwise encounter. For the memory-impaired elders, the garden often elicits happy memories of their youth spent on farms and in gardens, and life as it once was. Sunshine Care’s gardens provide flowers for the residences, fresh produce for meals served, and enough extra fruits and vegetables to help stock the local food bank.
We visited Sunshine Care Assisted Living in Poway, CA on a beautiful autumn day. Roy Wilburn, Sunshine Care’s Director of Horticulture had his intrepid team of seniors and students from the community harvesting a bounteous crop of late summer vegetables. They came away with buckets, literally, of cucumbers and tomatoes. One of the residents, James Richard Youse, inspected the harvest with Nan, telling her how wonderful fried green tomatoes were. It was a dish, he said, they ate because they didn’t want to wait for the fruit to turn red. Cooked similar to eggplant, breaded, pan-fried, and served with a little dash of hot sauce, it’s a regional treat that you don’t see much outside the south. But James certainly made it sound delicious, and his fond memories of enjoying this dish with the early tomatoes that are just starting to blush had all of thinking about stealing a few of the early fruits off the vine next time around.
Fried Green Tomatoes Recipe
Ingredients
- 4 medium, firm green or slightly blushed (pink) tomatoes
- 2 tsp Kosher Salt
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 Tbsp Cajun seasoning (optional)
- 1/2 cup milk or buttermilk
- 2 egg
- 1/3 cup cornmeal
- 1/2 cup fine dry bread crumbs
- 1/4 cup peanut oil or other vegetable oil
Directions
1 Cut unpeeled tomatoes into 1/2 inch slices. Sprinkle slices with salt. Let tomato slices stand for 5 minutes. Meanwhile, place in separate shallow bowls: the flour and Cajun seasoning (if using), buttermilk and egg, and bread crumbs and cornmeal.
2 Heat the peanut oil in a skillet on medium heat. Beat the egg and the buttermilk together. Dip tomato slices in the flour-seasoning mix, then buttermilk-egg mixture, then the cornmeal-bread crumb mix. In the skillet, fry half of the coated tomato slices at a time, for 3-5 minutes on each side or until brown. Set the cooked tomatoes on paper towels to drain.
3 Serve with your favorite dressing or try a dash of hot sauce.
