Gajimos?

 The other night I desperately needed a new vegetable idea to go with the cornbread and beans that I made.  Endlessly searching cooks.com, allrecipes.com, cooksrecipes.com, many other cooking websites I have stashed in my favorites (and also a lot of our cookbooks), I finally found this recipe for parmesan fried tomatoes.  (And this was great because we have a lot of tomatoes in the garden!)

Parmesan Pan Fried Tomatoes

1 C. flour

1 T. onion powder

2 t. garlic

1 t. salt

1/2 t. ground black pepper

1 C. parmesan cheese

1 C. Panko Japanese bread crumbs

12 slices tomatoes, sliced 1/2-inch thick

2 large eggs

2 T. mustard

3 T. olive oil

1. Combine flour, onion powder, granulated garlic, salt and pepper. Mix well.
2. In separate bowl combine panko and Parmesan.
3. In third bowl combine eggs and mustard.
4. Take slices of tomato and dip in flour, dust off excess. Then dip in egg mixture, letting excess drip off. Finally dip in parmesan/panko mixture, pressing Parmesan mixture onto slices for good coverage. Repeat until all slices are breaded. These should be stored in a single layer dusted lightly with extra crumbs.
5. Heat olive oil in non-stick frying pan, over medium-high heat. Place 3 slices in pan, and let cook about 1 1/2 to 2 minutes on each side, until just golden brown. Don’t flip too soon or Parmesan mix will fall off. Serve hot.

Makes 4 servings.

And since it only made 4 servings, I doubled the flour mixture (which I really didn’t need to do! You can dip as many tomatoes as you want in the 1 C. of flour and still have left overs!), and used enough tomatoes for all of us, and used a lot of parmesan cheese! I didn’t really even need to measure that. 

Oh yes. And I didn’t use the Panko Japanese bread crumbs because at the time I didn’t even know what those were, and we had no bread to replace it. But they still turned out fine.

 But why is this post titled “Gajimos”? What does that have to do with me needing a vegetable idea and making tomatoes fried in parmesan cheese?

While I was making these, one of the younger girls asked me what those “things” were. Cassia told her that they were “gajimos”.  (She just made up a word that sounded like a foreign language.)

“What’s gajimos?”

“Uhh…some kind of vegetable. It’s new. We got it through co-op.”

“Ooh. Susannah, what are those?”

 “Didn’t Cassia tell you?”

“Yea, but what are they?”

“It’s a fruit.” (You know, tomatoes are a fruit)

“Ummm… I know! It’s hotdogs! See…there is the mustard and ketchup!” (the ketchup was the tomatoes!)

“You really think so?”

“I don’t know, but Susannah, what are those?”

And finally I told her that they were just tomatoes that were fried in parmesan cheese 🙂

I think most of everybody liked them. I couldn’t judge by my own tastebuds because I don’t like tomatoes anyways. 🙂  But I will probably make them again….because Daddy did like them! 🙂

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