An Adventure - Green Tomato Pie with Whole Wheat Crust

I have been loving the cold weather we have been having here in Dallas lately! Snow in December, who would have guessed. Unfortunately, the freezing cold weather took the life of my poor tomato plants. We had about 20 tomatoes left on the vine so I decided to pick them off and see what I could do with them.

For breakfast on Thanksgiving I made Alton Brown's fried green tomatoes from his book I'm Just Here for the Food. We used corn meal instead of ritz crackers, and they were delicious, but we couldn't exactly cook up 20 tomatoes worth of fried green tomatoes.

I searched the internet for what to do with my batch of green tomatoes and my options seemed to be fried green tomatoes, tomato relish and green tomato pie.

Just like you, I though green tomato pie, BLECH! But this was the only recipe for which I had all of the ingredients on hand, and all of the reviews of the pie were good reviews. I figured it was worth trying, and if nothing else we could make it, taste it, and toss it. No one ever had to know.

As we started, we realized we were out of white flour so we ended up having to use wheat. Again, I figured this was going to be a tosser anyway, so why not go ahead and experiment with whole wheat pie crust.

Well, wouldn't you know this pie pretty much rocks. It tastes like a very tangy apple pie, one of the best apple pies I've had, except for it is green tomatoes. I will admit, there is a little bit of a don't think about what you are eating factor. I didn't take a picture of the pie before we tested it, but I guess that is good because you get to see that the filling looks perfectly normal. I guess if you wanted you could call this a way to sneak in some vegetables.

In case you are curious, here is the recipe I used for the pie (because the reviews said the filling was too runny, I added 1/4c extra flour and this flour was whole wheat as well, and then more cinnamon to compensate):

Green Tomato Pie

and for the crust (I only had 1 3/4 sticks of butter and this was the only recipe I could find that didn't call for 2 sticks of butter. I ended up making 1 1/2 of this recipe so I could have enough for a lattice top. Like I said, I used whole wheat flour instead of white. Also, this recipe needed sugar, so I added sugar on top. You, however, can use whatever crust you like!):

Pie Crust

And while I was writing this blog I found this Paula Deen recipe to try

Green Tomato Cake with Brown Butter Frosting

Oh, and while I was searching for that cake recipe again, I found Paula Deen makes a green tomato pie. See, I'm not such a freak after all, in this instance any way.

Paula Deen's Green Tomato Pie