Fried green tomatoes are little slices of heaven

It's an inarguable fact that you can fry anything and it'll taste great. Mozzarella, ravioli, chicken, mushrooms, zucchini, ice cream - dip any of these in the appropriate breading or batter and you've got a crackling, crispy delight bound to keep any restaurant's menu alive, if not necessarily healthy. I could feel my arteries harden and my stomach flip with excitement after I learned I'd be making fried green tomatoes with Eric Alexander and Courtney McDonald, who share kitchen duties at Carpe Vino in Old Town Auburn. Fried Green Tomato Salad recipeMakes one serving: 1 small green, unripe tomato1 slice Applewood-smoked bacon1 oz. blue cheese5 grape or cherry tomatoes, halvedHandful baby arugula or watercress½ cup canola oilCOATING (enough for six salads)1 egg1 cup buttermilk1 cup yellow cornmeal 1 cup flourPinch of sugarPinch of saltPinch of cayenne pepperDRESSING (enough for a dressing bottle)1/3 cup red wine vinegar1 tsp. Dijon mustard1 cup canola oil½ cup crème fraiche (can substitute sour cream) ½ cup buttermilkStart by cooking the bacon and making the dressing. Pan fry the bacon or bake it in a pan at 425 degrees for about 20-25 minutes. To make dressing, blend wine vinegar, mustard and oil, slowly adding the crème fraiche. Stir in buttermilk. Sprinkle salt and pepper to taste. Slice tomato into pieces ½ inch thick. Bring ½ cup oil up to a medium heat in a frying pan. Mix egg and buttermilk in one dish. In a second dish, hand-mix cornmeal and flour, adding pinches of sugar, salt and cayenne pepper. Dip tomato slice into egg mixture and then into cornmeal. Fry tomatoes for one minute on each side. Remove from heat and place on rack. Drizzle plate with salad dressing. Place fried tomatoes and bacon pieces atop arugula and add cherry tomatoes as garnish. Crumble blue cheese.I've heard of fried green tomatoes, both because they were a favorite of my Papa Ed's and because I've seen the movie by the same name hundreds of times, but I had never tasted them. I've heard fried green tomatoes are something you either love or hate, without much gray space in between. I've never met a tomato I didn't love, so I figured I'd have no problem appreciating this dish.Fried green tomatoes have been quite popular since they went on Carpe Vino's dinner menu, Alexander, 27, said. The tomato is the main feature of a salad incorporating Applewood-smoked bacon, Shaft's blue cheese and a garnish of ripe cherry tomatoes all served atop locally grown arugula. "It's a nice biting contrast to the blue cheese and the vinaigrette," McDonald said of the arugula. The dressing she speaks of is a house-made buttermilk vinaigrette that completes the dish, which goes for $10 at Carpe Vino.Alexander and McDonald, 25, met as students at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. This boyfriend and girlfriend duo moved to Auburn a couple years ago - McDonald is an Auburn native and both she and Alexander, who grew up in New York, wanted to give West Coast kitchens a try. "We weren't looking to come back to Auburn," McDonald said. "It just kind of happened."Gary Moffat, owner of Carpe Vino, said he is thrilled to have Alexander and McDonald at Carpe Vino. "We built the restaurant around these two guys," he said. The kitchen space is an intimate experience of its own - narrow, well kept and small when compared to the cooking space of other area restaurants. The dinner menu reflects the kitchen's size."Our menu is small and compact, because of the size of the place," Alexander said.Fried green tomatoes are a great early-summer recipe, McDonald said."It's a classic American dish and this happens to be the time of year where we don't have ripe tomatoes just yet," she said. What makes this not-quite-ripe plate flourish on Carpe Vino's menu?"Everybody loves fried green tomatoes and everyone's heard of it," Alexander said.Alexander and McDonald had already taken care of the two most time-consuming elements - cooking the bacon and mixing the buttermilk vinaigrette - before I arrived, so I jumped into the recipe by cutting a tomato into ½-inch thick slices. Alexander plunked two square, shallow containers down for the coating and covering process. I whisked an egg and buttermilk in one container and used a fork to mix flour and cornmeal in the other, adding pinches of sugar, salt and cayenne pepper. McDonald poured oil in a frying pan and put it on the stove to heat up while I dunked tomato slices first in the egg mix and then into the dry mix. When making this dish, be sure to let excess egg drip off the tomato before moving on to the cornmeal mix, or you might have a bit of a mess. Unripe green tomatoes are best for the recipe because they're not as juicy, which means they hold form and don't ooze all over the frying pan, Alexander said. It doesn't take long for the tomatoes to fry - about one minute on each side, so the slices are golden brown, "not burnt brown," McDonald said. Both chefs agree that a cast iron pan is the best hardware for this dish, but any nonstick frying pan will do the trick.The tomatoes came off the stove looking like little pan-fried pieces of heaven, but we couldn't dig in quite yet.To make the tomatoes even more visually appetizing, Alexander zigzagged the buttermilk vinaigrette across a rectangular dish. The next layer is the arugula, topped with both the green and cherry tomatoes and the sliced bacon. Crumbles of savory, pungent blue cheese act as the cherry on top, completing this fried, green and fabulous dish. I've found my new fried favorite. The Journal's Loryll Nicolaisen can be reached at lorylln@goldcountrymedia.com.