Saintly Figs

Ok, maybe saintly isn't the word for them, consecrated? Except they weren't actually growing in the cemetery, so maybe not that either.

I love old cemeteries of any kind. I find them peaceful and beautiful with their overgrown plants and their hard to read gravestones. One of my favorite places in the world is a tiny cemetery tucked into a hillside int he Wicklow Mountains. In college, Will and I used to take out lunches to one on the University of Oregon campus and sprawl out on the shady grass between the tombs. But to combine an old cemetery and a fig tree, well, now you're talking!

Last summer one of our neighbors turned me onto a fig tree that overhangs into a nearby cemetery. It is growing in a garden next to the cemetery who's ground is much lower than that of the level of the graves, making the upper branches easy to reach and the figs easy to harvest. Perfect, except by the time I learned all of this last year, the figs were all but gone and I was only able to bring home enough for a few mornings breakfast. This year I was determined to get up there when the tree was bursting with ripe fruit.

This morning Nigella and I set off for our walk with a big basket and crossed fingers, and boy did we hit the jackpot. Because I know that there are other who pick from this tree (the owners have given full blessing, they don't like figs - crazy people!) I only took the fruit from one of the many branches. But even with the one branch limit, I was able to fill my basket up with fat, firm fruit, perfect for a second batch of my grandmothers dried figs. Heaven. Of course, after I'd finished picking and was attempting to hold the leash and basket with sticky hands, I realized that some dude had been sitting under the next tree over reading to himself while I chatted to the fruits I was picking about how pretty they were. So now there's one more person in Charlottesville who thinks I'm nuts.

The last batch turned out exceedingly well. The figs were smaller to start with the the variety that grew on my grandmother's tree, so the dried figs are only about half the size, but they taste almost exactly the same, and I've already worked my way through a third of the batch, which doesn't bode well for my plan of having enough dried fruit to get me through the winter. But hey, a few more early morning tromps through the cemetery and I might make a dent in the amount of figs we consume throughout the year.

My garden is coming to the end of it's season and I have to say I learned a lot about growing vegetables in Virginia. Corn, for example, will need to be planted in a more sheltered area (as seen in the total destruction of the main crop during the microburst, whaaaa) The number of tomato plants could easily be doubled, or tripled, if I want to make sauce. The sauce I made a few weeks ago was delicious, really and truly yummy, but it only made one large jar, which we finished off last night in a lasagna. Kale is crazily hardy, if only I can find something to do with it. Pumpkin vines whithered in the heat while squash and cucumbers went bonkers. Next year I'll want more pepper plants, more herbs and probably less carrots since I'm the only one who really likes them anyway. The popcorn was a hit, the beans went out of control and were all ripe at the same time, so next year I'll plant them in succession.

I'm puttering with the idea of pickled squash, or maybe canned squash if I can get my hands on a pressure canner for a few days. and Evelyn and I made a jar of grape jelly this weekend using the grapes from Will's "vineyard". One jar because, well, his vineyard is two and a half (the half is so little it didn't produce any grapes this year) young plants. That and Evie discovered that Nigella really likes grapes, so a good third of what we did manage to grow went to the dog.

It seems weird that, technically, the summer is almost over. Or at least the gardening part of the summer. Not that there wont be more canning to do in the next few weeks. In fact, the rest of August and September will probably see our pantry fuller than it's been all summer, starting with a fruit share that I've ordered for tomorrow and carrying on through the rest of the peaches, plums and apples. But school begins for both kids next week, my boy turns eight (EIGHT!) tomorrow and despite the heat, my mind is starting to think fall. Now if it would only cool down enough to actually feel like fall...That, would be fantastic.

Fig Season

So as it turns out, I'm feeling bold. Or at least this morning I was feeling bold. On my way up to feed the chickens I spent ten minutes picking a basket full of ripe figs. I could have spent an hour and had bushels, but that would have required a ladder, and the chickens were starting to squawk with impatience.

After removing a handful for my breakfast I weighed (3 1/2 pounds) and washed the figs and set them out to dry off a little while I decide what to do with them. I can either go with the Drunken Fig Jam recipe from Epicurious or I can get my grandmothers dried fig recipe going in the hopes that by the time the four days it takes to prep them for drying, Will and I can have some kind of solar dryer rigged up. I'm thinking the latter, because Will likes dried figs as much (well, not really as much, but he does like them) as I do (drat the man, I used to have them all to my self!:)) And while I like fig jam, well, it's certainly not as high on my list as dried figs. I mean, duh, I named my blog after them. Right?

My grandmother's dried fig recipe is something of a mystery to me. I could, of course, ask her about it. But it's kind of fun to just wonder. Here's how it reads

5 lbs fresh figs with stems (I may have to get that ladder out to make up that 1 1/2 pound difference!)

wash and add 2 cups of water and 1 cup of sugar

1. Boil one hour covered. Pour into a glass dish
2. Next day - boil 1 hour uncovered
3. Next day - boil 1 hour uncovered
4. Next day - boil 1 hour uncovered

Drain in colander, let set until cool. Take out and shape. Lay on racks to dry in the sun. Dry until no longer sticky feeling. Turn over at least once while drying.

OK, so here's my theory. My grandmother had five kids. FIVE. And she was one of those wonder women who made most of their food from scratch, preserved a ton of things from the garden, sewed clothes and quilts and whatever else needed making. So I'm not saying this is how it happened, but if that were my recipe, it would have come about from a) starting to boil my figs too late in the day and then realizing that I needed the pot for dinner, hence the glass bowl. And then I would have forgotten about then so the next day I would have to reboil them. And then I'd forget again and have to reboil them again. And then I'd have to run out and get some part that my kids took off my dryer for a project that I didn't remember until just that moment so I'd have to reboil one more time. But my grandmother was probably far more organized than that, so I'll just take it on faith that this is just the way the recipe has to be. And after all, I've never in my life had a dried fig that was as good as hers always are, so I'm willing to follow it to a "T". Although I may have to use a ceramic bowl instead of a glass, unless I feel very virtuous and go out and buy a glass one. But I've already been bold today, so virtuous will probably have to wait until tomorrow.

Ter-maters

When Will and I were in college, we had this monster, MONSTER vegetable patch in our way overly large for two college students yard. And when I say the thing was big, I mean it. Right now our garden is plenty big for the four of us (which doesn't stop me from making plans to expand it) and I'd guess that it's a third the size of the space we planted back then. I'm not sure what we were thinking. Actually, Will was thinking I was crazy and just went along for the ride and I had - no surprise here- dreams of growing most of our food. It hadn't occurred to me to get chickens at that point, probably good since we were poor as dirt and couldn't even splurge on things like, say, tomato cages, so building a chicken coop would probably have been beyond our means a bit, not that we wouldn't have done it anyway.

Because we were experimenting in pretty bare bones gardening, our cageless tomatoes were held up, sort of, with some sticks tied together with yarn. Not much help. By August the tomato patch, which was oversized, even by our garden's standards (I had started tons and tons of tomatoes from seed because I had heard it was hard to get them going, and then they all lived, and I couldn't stand the thought of killing any of my little plants so, yeah, there were a lot) was a giant tangled jungle of brandywines, sweet one thousands, yellow pear and beefsteak tomatoes. We couldn't possibly eat that many tomatoes. Not even if we'd had them for breakfast lunch and dinner. I wanted to preserve them, somehow, and sauce seemed too complicated with all the warnings about botulism and spoiling and the need for a presser canner, which, given the fact that I didn't have tomato cages, was not high on my priority list of things to buy.

In the end, I dried them. I took all the screens off our windows, hosed them down and filled them up with slices and halved tomatoes, stacking them inside the barbecue that we got at a garage sale for $5 and which almost blew up the first time we used it (scared us off of gas grills for years!) My reasoning was that the barbecue would help collect the heat, covered in black who-knows what as it was, and I could close the lid each night to keep the evil raccoon that lived under our house from eating my garden largess.

Surprisingly, it worked. I had stacks and stacks of sun dried tomatoes. Most went into baggies and then into the pantry, some were packed in jars of oil, and for the rest of the year we ate sun dried tomatoes in and on and with, just about everything. Not a bad way to dine for a couple of starving students.

I've never gone that crazy with tomatoes again. It was too much work to keep up with the harvesting and drying. And besides, we use our grill too often these days. But I did plant eleven plants this year. Most of them heirloom varieties that came in a mix from Southern States Seed Exchange with a few garden center romas thrown into the mix. Despite the heat of the summer, it wasn't until last week though, that any of our fruits were ripe enough to pick. But suddenly we have tomatoes coming out our ears. And isn't that always the way, you wait and wait for that first garden tomato and then all of a sudden you have more than you can handle.

So far I'm not drying them, although I have a scheme that involves Will building a solar dryer like the one my grandmother had in her yard. But that really hinges on how bold I feel about harvesting the figs off of two trees down the road (the owners are away in France all summer, last year I took some here and there, but for this to work I'd need tons. On the other hand, they are just falling to the ground up there...) In the meantime, I've decided to try making sauce.

I still don't have a pressure canner, but after perusing many, many recipes, I think I've come up with a plan that will produce a good sauce without killing my family. Batch number one is in the works right now, cut into chunks and roasting in the oven (no oil! Oil is bad it seems in terms of canning) making our whole house smell wonderful. And if at the end of the day, it doesn't taste good enough to jar up, well, I've still got another basketful of ripe beauties waiting for some other recipe, and several more that will be ready tomorrow.

And now that I think about it, we do need to pull off all the screens to paint.

Fresh Figs, with Just a Tiny Side of Guilt

Would it still be considered foraging if you picked the basket full of figs in your fridge off the two HUGE trees in the kind of mean neighbors next to where your chickens live who are in France until September? Really, I was rescuing them. Right?

Beside, they were the people who objected to the chickens because they could not understand how a chicken could lay eggs if you didn't have a rooster. And if I don't pick them, they'll just rot anyway. AND, there are THREE varieties. THREE!

Humm, I'm going to need to do some digging in my cookbooks not yet unpacked box for that recipe. That is if I don't just eat them all first. Homemade yogurt, sliced ripe figs, blueberries and honey. Gooooodddd breakfast.