Dear friends,
You may have wondered if it were just your imagination, or if the pickings around here had become a bit slim since Sunday night's sous-vide rant. It is not your imagination. This week was the culmination of a summer's work at the box factory, the week in which we crunched number after number after number, put them all together on spreadsheets, and then sent them to the customer on whose account I work; all of this effort has been to convince a customer with whom we've had a 20-year relationship that we want to extend that relationship. Unfortunately, they are a public company, as are we. On a person-to-person, day-to-day level, our willingness to go the extra mile to accommodate the customer is appreciated by nearly everyone with whom we work , but at the end of the day, there is only one metric that matters to a public company. I am keeping every digit I have crossed that we have what it takes to hit that metric, that our hard work will pay off, and that we get to keep dancing with Big Cosmetic Company for two more years.
So I'll own up, dear friends: I've been more than a little distracted this week, this month, this summer. But now the deed has been done, the project has been put to bed, and I have other concerns, namely what should be done with the two pints of black figs in our kitchen. We have been getting great figs this summer at the fruit and vegetable markets in my neighborhood, from small ones the size of pecans to large ones the length of my thumb, green-stemmed, round-bottomed. I came to figs late in life, eating them only in Fig Newtons as a kid, moving on in college to dried Calimyrna figs, which I used to buy in the Strip District in Pittsburgh. I shied away from the fresh ones for years, having read somewhere -- I can't remember where, but I'm thinking that it was a bogus source -- that if you couldn't pick the fig off the tree in California or Italy, it was not a fig worth eating. I don't even want to think of how many figs I passed by in the last ten years.
These figs are worth eating. The trick, now, is to figure out how. Nearly every baking book I own has an idea: fig cake, fig cupcakes, fig jam, fig pie, fig tart. Nigel Slater has a tart on which I've had my eye for years: shortcrust pastry, figs, honey, mascarpone. I decide right, that's it, it's time to make this tart once and for all, and then I stop, thinking of those figs sliced, sauteed briefly in melted butter, sprinkled with sugar, shaken in the pan and tumbled into a bowl with a little blob of mascarpone or creme fraiche waiting to cut the sugar. I think about those figs cut into crosshatch, drizzled with the heather honey we brought home from Scotland, a little orange flower water shaken over all of it. I think of cranking up the broiler, crosshatching the figs, filling them with bittersweet chocolate chips, popping them under the broiler for a few seconds, just until the chocolate melts, calling out the creme fraiche again. I will contemplate all of these as I go into the kitchen and, purely for quality-control purposes, take two figs out of one of the pint baskets, bite into them, feel the sugar against my tongue and palate, contemplate the rose-colored seeds and try to keep juice from running down my neck. Did I mention that this year's figs are really, really good?