A Farm-to-Table Story

Figs just soared to the top of my list of favorite fruits.  Never having eaten them as a child, I first discovered figs while experimenting with a recipe from Bon Appetit over ten years ago. To this day it’s one of my favorite appetizers: crostini topped with a wedge of fig and slice of Roquefort cheese, broiled for a couple of minutes, and served hot from the oven. It’s Heaven! More recently I sampled a brie cheese topped with a fig preserve and loved it. Who can resist the samples at Costco or, in this case, our local Safeway?  I didn’t buy either item, but I did begin searching for a recipe for fig preserves with plans to make my own appetizer and found one in my new Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.

Thus, I was prepared when we received an early morning call from our friend Otti telling us her figs were ready for picking…we wasted no time. By about noon we’d picked a box of the ripened figs and were home making our preserves. By 3 p.m. we’d processed two batches and had ten half-pint jars of fig preserves resting on the counter.  That’s got to be some kind of farm-to-table record!

This was a new and exciting experience for both of us. Fig trees and fruit are unlike any other. The leaves are huge, dark green, and glossy and do a great job hiding the fruit from the sun, as well as birds and, believe it or not, raccoons. The process of picking is best done with two people. One to climb into the tree and look for ripened fruit, cutting the figs from branches using a small pair of scissors, and then carefully handing each one to the assistant to be carefully placed in a single layer in a box to transport home. Sounds like a process that takes extreme “care”? You have no idea! Figs are incredibly delicate with a soft, edible skin that offers no protection. It’s no wonder figs are rarely available at the grocery store…they have a very short season, don’t like to travel, and insist on being eaten within a very few days of being picked. Keep them for any length of time and they begin to ooze their sweet, sticky “life blood” from a small opening in the bottom. (I speak from experience!) In one word, they are delicate! However, we captured the moment and now have enough fig jam to enjoy with both sweet and savory dishes well into next year.

This would be a good time to end this farm-to-table story, but our home canning didn’t end with the fig preserves. We left Otti’s that day not only with a box of figs, but boxes of plums and peaches, the latter being the final harvest of about 20 Elbertas. This summer I’ve bought lugs of Elberta peaches from R&K Orchards near Redding (see my earlier blog on our trip to Portland) and Zee Girl peaches from the Fruit Bowl on Highway 88. I’ve canned whole peaches in a simple syrup and made Spicy Ginger-Peach Jam on half a dozen occasions (almost 50 half-pint jars). The last thing we needed were more peaches, but I couldn’t refuse (or should I say “resist”) the opportunity to make jam from Otti’s favorite peaches. So, my next order of business after canning the figs was to make yet another batch of jam. I don’t know that the jams from each of these peach varieties tastes markedly different, but the source of the peaches is identified by the labels and each one has a bit of a history and conjures up a different, but in each case excellent, memory of our 2013 summer. After all, for me canning is all about the process, which begins with our road trips and search for the perfect fruit.