This September’s Food and Wine magazine is chock full of southern American cooking — with a good many twists that intrigue me.

One recipe calls for oven-baked bacon, cornbread-crusted fried green tomatoes, and baby arugula on toasted whole wheat or multi-grain bread.

Yep. It’d work. I think.

So would this. I may try it next week when my adventuresome neice, Sherry, spends a couple of days with us. She’s mostly, but not exclusively, vegetarian so she happily eats whatever I cook. I like vegetarian meals; but my friend Sam, for whom I’ve never cooked, is vegan. I’ll share this idea with him, if Sherry thinks it works.

Okay: whole wheat toast. Low-fat mayonnaise and basil pesto, half and half. The biggest leaves from my basil plant, plus a small handful of mint leaves, also from our patio.

I know I could bum a couple of green tomatoes from neighbors. But how about this — supermarket tomatoes here this summer are hard as rocks, so why not slice a couple, batter them with egg thinned with a teaspoon of sauvignon blanc, and fry those up as if they were green?

And then — are you ready for this — a trick I learned at a trade show a decade or more ago: big oyster mushrooms fried in peanut oil.

Yes! They taste so much like bacon, and can be made moderately crisp as well, that I think vegans should collect around this idea unless they’re unalterably opposed to oil. Really — hidden inside a sandwich, I bet it would amaze half the taste-testers.

We’ll see. If it works, I’ll report it. If you don’t see anything more about this idea here, well, we didn’t like it. Fair enough? — Bob Cramer, The Fearless Taster.