After an encounter with the most adorable man, I ended up with close to a bushel of green tomatoes from the Agricenter this weekend. I was searching for small green tomatoes for a Lynne Rossetto Kasper recipe and I came upon an outside table.

“You can have everything on the table for $4,” the farmer told me. “This is the end of my harvest. Ain’t had no rain.”

I told him I could hardly turn that down, even though I didn’t know what I’d do with all those green tomatoes. Maybe I’d try to make chow chow, I told him. Good idea, he said. Fry ‘em up, too.

I asked him where he was from. “Tipton County,” he said. “Been there all my life. If my daddy was alive, he’d be 123 years old today.”

“Today’s his birthday?” I asked, and the response made me laugh out loud.

“No, he was born in January.”

Hmm. And my great-grandfather would be 140 today if he were still living!

Anyway, this man had me so charmed that my journalism hat just flew off my head. I didn’t ask his name, didn’t even think to get a picture of him. But I did promise him I’d let him know next year what I did with those green tomatoes.

So far I’ve made one batch of hot chow chow, but it doesn’t taste like my grandfather’s, so I’m going to try again. I took a big bag to my aunt because she makes wonderful fried green tomatoes, and I asked former CA food writer and freelancer Chris Gang to get together a story about freezer preservation. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I didn’t grow up canning and I don’t trust my ability there. I feel confident I could follow the process, but then we’d never eat the fruits of my labor because I’d be scared we’d get food poisoning.

So come on–I’ve got a ton of tomatoes. I know I can wrap them in newspapers and let them ripen, I can make pickles (but again, the canning), or I can fry them, but what else? Has anyone ever had a green tomato pie?