Now that it’s September, we’re entering another phase in our tomato watching. We’re coming to the end of the ripe tomato season for the determinate varieties, but the indeterminate tomatoes have kept flowering and setting fruit. From an evolutionary perspective, this is a pretty dumb move. Frost will kill the plants and spoil the fruit before it ripens. Even the seeds will be too green to sprout another year. So while we enjoy the last plates of insalata Caprese, we’re considering how to turn the immature fruit to good use. Before any of you readers bombard us with pickle recipes, we’re going on record that we already have enough pickles to last the winter. So now we’re trying to think of good ways to eat fried green tomatoes to reduce the supply in a hurry.

We first encountered a fried tomato BLT in northern Alabama on a trip exploring roots music. It seemed a natural, and almost everything is better with bacon. But on a visit to San Antonio’s Fiesta celebrations last year, we discovered the perfect pairing at Supper, the main restaurant of Hotel Emma (136 E Grayson St., San Antonio, TX; 210-448-8300, thehotelemma.com). The hotel occupies the handsome former brewhouse of the Pearl Brewery, but Supper serves on its outdoor patio whenever possible. As an appetizer, chef John Brand was serving a double dose of Southern standards: fried green tomatoes with pimento cheese. It was an inspired pairing of smooth and crunchy, spicy and tart. (Here’s a recipe for pimento cheese.)

That’s Brand’s plate of pimento cheese and fried green tomatoes at the top of the post. Making fried green tomatoes is a cinch, of course. Cut thick slices of tomato. Whisk together some eggs and buttermilk and make a cornmeal and flour dredging mixture. (We usually figure three parts cornmeal to one part flour.) Add seasoning to your own taste, but definitely include salt, pepper, and a little dried chile pepper. Dip tomatoes in egg mixture, dredge through cornmeal-flour mix, and fry in hot fat in a cast-iron chicken cooker. (For the uninitiated, that’s a 10-inch frying pan with four inch sides—sort of a half-height Dutch oven. We use one that belonged to Pat’s grandmother from East Tennessee. It was probably her grandmother’s.) Serve the fried green tomatoes with pimento cheese and a playlist of Delta blues.