Lemon Fig Marmalade

I am participating in a year long Food In Jars Mastery Challenge hosted by Marisa from Food in Jars and the January challenge was marmalade! I have never made marmalade. I have made all kinds of jellies, jams and preserves. Marmalade is basically the same, but they have a citrus base of orange, lemon, lime or other citrus fruit. I chose lemon to pair with the figs I had in the freezer!

6 cups fresh figs
3 lemons (scrub well)
6 cups sugar*

Cut the stems off the figs and cut into quarters.
Cut the rind off the lemons and slice into small strips. Add the juice and a little water to a pan and simmer until the zest/rind is soft.
Pour the figs into a heavy based preserving pan. Add the lemon mixture and simmer until the figs are soft and break down a little.

Add the sugar and let it dissolve before bringing up to a rolling boil.
Boil for about 30 minutes or until it has reached the setting point (220 degrees).
Carefully ladle into sterilized jars and put on the lids. 

Place jars in a boiling water bath (this can be a large stock pot with a rack on the bottom) and cover completely with water to 2" over the top of the jars.

Cover stock pot with lid and bring water to a rolling boil over high heat. Reduce heat some, but maintain a boil and process jars in the boiling water 10 minutes.

Remove jars from boiling water bath and allow to sit undisturbed on a kitchen towel on your counter-top 24 hours.

Store in a cool pantry for up to a year.

*The amount of sugar may vary according to the sweetness of your fruit. My figs were very ripe and very sweet when I froze them this summer.

Cinnamon-Vanilla Fig Topping

With all the figs coming in early, I'm putting a lot of them in the freezer for now. I'll make one big batch of preserves and then save some to experiment on with new recipes! 

This recipe is great as a topping for oatmeal, pancakes, biscuits and ice cream...

plus anything else you can imagine!

4 cups of figs, washed, stemmed and quartered
8 tablespoons of sugar (or honey)
1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon of vanilla
4 oz of water (for consistency)

Combine the ingredients in a sauce pan and simmer until mixture is the consistency of a thick glaze.

"No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers." ~ Laurie Colwin

If I had a dime for every time someone said, “I use the same recipe Judy did and it never comes out the same”...  I watched Mama make biscuits a hundred times and I would ask her to just write it down. She used to ask me how was she supposed to write down something she “just did”? “Just Watch," she would say. I watched as she added flour to Grandmama Bradham’s “biscuit bowl”(an old aluminum bowl that looked like Charlie got after it with a hammer). She made a “well” in the center of the flour, poured in some milk and then added a generous hand-full of shortening. She said that it was the hand-mixing that made them taste so good. But somehow that pile of goo turned into some of the most wonderful tastes, smells, and memories that I could ever have imagined. She gently patted out each one with her hands and laid her fingers across each one as her put it on the cookie sheet, leaving behind the ridges on top. 

I remember opening the oven and seeing these golden brown, flat, flaky, melt-in-your-mouth biscuits that smelled so good that you could hear the drool sizzle as it hit the oven door! We had to flip the biscuit over and spread jelly on the bottom because you could not cut the biscuit without it crumbling to pieces. Daddy used to joke and say they were “crummy.” I can still see him sitting there after supper with the handle of his spoon making a “well” in a biscuit and pouring syrup inside until it ran over spilling on the plate. (That is, if we were out of Aunt Dot’s Fig Preserves.)

I remember growing up “in the kitchen.” When someone was down, you cook. When someone was celebrating, you cook. When someone had a death in the family, you cook. It wasn’t so much the food that Mama cooked that made it taste so good...(and here’s the secret) it was the love Mama added that made it all so special. I never realized just how much Mama did for so many people until she was gone and the stories started coming to me from everyone she touched in her life. I have boxes of cards, cut-outs from magazines, and hand-written copies of dozens and dozens of recipes Mama collected over the years. She wrote notes on them. She wrote notes in cookbooks she gave to me. She also kept cards as reminders of what people liked so she could make special things for them again when they were down, or “up.” She kept 3X5 cards recording special dinners.

For example:


Gary & Kathy Taylor - Mr & Mrs Thames June 1970
Turkey & Gravy
Dressing
Rice (cream and sugar for Gary’s rice)
Biscuits
Peas
Sweet Potato Imperial
Corn Pie
Emerald Salad (Gary’s favorite)
Red Velvet Cake

If someone asked Mama to make “that chicken” she made last time, she could look it up.... She also wrote notes like: (.... doesn’t like...) and (.....s are ....’s favorite) or (...... is allergic to .....)

All these things made you feel like you were the center of every meal and the meal was always unforgettable.

It was a time... "sometime before flirting became extinct, when letter writing was an art, stationary was engraved, and dinner was an event." Dash Goff, the writer to Julia Sugarbaker on Designing Women

Fig Newtons

I have a fig tree that is loaded with little figs. I can't wait for them to rippen so I can make my own fig newtons! If you click on this picture, it will let you magnify it and you can really see the tiny figs!

They are hard to see, but if you look close,
you can see tons of tiny green circles.
Those are my figs :-)


1 lb. dried figs or 2 lbs. fresh figs
1 cup sugar
1/2 or 1 cup water (1 cup for dried figs; 1/2 cup for fresh)
1/2 cup butter, room temp
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 tbsp cream or milk
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 3/4 cup flour

Dice figs, soak in water 1 hour. Add sugar & cook on medium heat until thin jam consistency.
Beat sugar, butter, egg, milk & vanilla until well blended. Add dry ingredients. Mix well and refrigerate for 1 hour. Place 1/2 on well floured dough cloth; knead about 6 times. Roll out to 1/4" thick. Line 13 x 9" glass dish; cover with figs. Roll remaining dough, cover figs. Cook at 350' 30 minutes. Let cool and cut into squares.