Tomato Pie

Right now I'm fixing to show you my tomato pie

Normally I would make my tomato pie with just a regular vine-ripe tomato

but Ray talked me into trying one of his heirloom tomatoes, and this is a Cherokee, and it's beautiful

You see how dark it is in color. In fact, when I first saw him I thought, gosh, Ray's got some kind of rotten tomatoes up there

but he insisted that I taste it, so I promised him I was going to try this in my tomato pie today

We're going to start by cutting a little notch through the skin of our tomato, and we're

going to drop it into boiling water, and we're going to leave it for about 30 seconds, 45 seconds

It doesn't take long. You can lift it up in a few minutes, and you can actually see that skin splitting on you

Let's see if we can see. The skin's already split on it just that quickly, and that was probably less than 30 seconds

and then we're going to put it into the ice water. The ice water stops the cooking on it, and it makes it cool enough for us to handle

See that skin will just slip right off. That's so much easier

Beautiful, perfectly peeled tomato. We're gonna come over here now, we're gonna slice these up and get them ready for our pie

This is a dish that I serve on all the major holidays Thanksgiving Easter Father Day Mother Day We always serve tomato pie at our guest because it is such a special dish Now on your pie crust you can either make your own or you can just use a frozen

When I'm doing cocktail parties, I buy little frozen phyllo shells, and I actually chop the tomatoes up

and fill them into these little shells, and we pass them at cocktail parties, and people just love them

And right now, I'm going to take the tomatoes that I've peeled, and I'm throwing them into a colander

and I'm gonna just lightly salt them. And we're gonna give these tomatoes just a minute to drain

because we don't want our pie crust all soggy, even though that tomato juice is wonderful in there

And while they're draining, we're gonna come over here and make our dressing. And all we're doing here is taking a cup of mayonnaise

and mixing it with a cup of cheddar cheese and a cup of mozzarella

And we're just gonna stir that together. How simple. And we're just going to throw a little salt into here

And a little pepper. And while I'm waiting for our tomatoes to drain, I'm just going to run out here in the garden

and clip a little fresh basil. If you'd like, come on along

The basil is just wonderful It doesn take a lot for your pie but it adds the greatest greatest flavor So let go over here and see if our tomatoes are ready I

think we've got them drained pretty good. So all we're going to do is just lay our tomatoes

around in the bottom of our crust. Isn't that beautiful? And next we're going to top it with

our spring onions, but we're just gonna spread those over the top of our pie. Now at this

point you can kind of just play with it and do whatever you'd like. You can go ahead and

pinch your basil on the top or you could even mix it into your dressing, which it doesn't

matter. But I think I'm just gonna pinch it and make sure that no matter where you cut

it or where you dip, you're gonna get a bite of that wonderful basil. You know this is

one of those dishes that's so, so easy. I almost don't even know how it could give you problems

Probably the most important thing to the whole dish is just getting as much juice out of your tomatoes

as you can so that it won't make your pie crust soggy

So all we're gonna do now is just frost our pie with our mayonnaise and cheese

We'll just dot it around. And I can't think of a meal that this pie is not good with

On Mother's Day, my son invited me over for breakfast. before he sent me off to work, I might add

Seems like he had the day off but he fed me and sent me on to work And he had scrambled eggs and tomato pie and it was so wonderful together for breakfast

It's fabulous with steak. It's wonderful with fried chicken. It's just great with just about everything and every meal that I can think of

There's just not a place that this pie won't go. All we have to do now is just put this in the oven until all of our ingredients are hot

and our frosting has melted, and you're in for a real treat when it's ready

I'll tell you right now, I got so excited about my fresh vegetables

I made two pies, and I think the other one is ready

Oh, look. Look at our luscious pie

The great thing about this tomato pie is this is the only garnish you need

a fresh piece of basil. I think I'm gonna have to go ahead and cut this pie

and give it a taste. Look at the juice from the tomatoes

Oh my gosh. A hot tomato sandwich with cheese. Thank you