Thanks to our chilly weather, local gardens and farm fields are loaded with green tomatoes. That creates a dilemma for cooks: Other than fried green tomatoes, what can be done with them?

When I was growing up in University City, almost every corner had a deli and just about every deli had a big jar or barrel of pickled green tomatoes. And when we'd visit my Polish grandmother in New York City, she'd often make a tangy soup based on pickled green tomatoes.

You can pickle tomatoes using a cooking-and-canning method, but we found a shortcut recipe that eliminates the need for processing.

I also vaguely remembered that you could make a pie — not a savory pie, but a dessert — from green tomatoes. I found the recipe in one of my old cookbooks, a classic from 1983 called "Richard Nelson's American Cooking," written by a close friend of food icon James Beard. And as it turned out, Paula Deen had a similar recipe in "The Lady & Sons Just Desserts" (Simon & Schuster, 2006), although hers added small amounts of cinnamon and nutmeg and the option of raisins.

As to fried green tomatoes: Patrick and Gina Neely of Food Network fame recently weighed in with a modernized version of the classic recipe. In their new cookbook, "Down Home with the Neelys" (Alfred A. Knopf), they fluff up the coating by using Japanese bread crumbs and provide a recipe for a basil mayonnaise as an updated condiment.

Finally, maybe you can help solve a mystery that arose as I wandered from booth to booth at the Ferguson Farmers Market on a recent Saturday. An older woman who had shopped just before me asked all the farmers if they had a recipe she remembered from her childhood: Green Tomato Pudding. Several of the farmers said that she'd described it as a savory bread pudding thickened with cornmeal. It sounded like a casserole variation on fried green tomatoes, or maybe just regular tomato pudding, substituting green tomatoes for red.

I searched our cookbook collections and the Internet and came up empty. If you have a recipe or have even heard of Green Tomato Pudding, please let me know: My e-mail and phone number are at the top of this story.