So it’s been a while, at least a few weeks, since I last blogged about figs. No worries though, because I made fig preserves for the first time with the last batch of ripe figs. I even canned them and everything. I usually shy away from canning but it seems to have worked out.
After a bit of reading recipes, I decided I could make fig preserves with only a few simple ingredients:
Came across a recipe in this month’s vegetarian times magazine that I had all of the ingredients for, and some zucchini about to go bad. Very delicate flavor. I might top the same recipe with parmesan or cotija cheese next time. Pictures of zucchini with pistachios and mint:
What to do when you have more cucumbers, tomatoes and basil growing than you can reasonably eat or give away? Find a way to freeze them of course! A few weeks back we were in the middle of an amazing tomato season which I’m sad to say is just about over now because of the Texas summer heat. Anyhow, I decided to make some gazpacho, a delicious cold summer soup. I didn’t feel like going to the store for extra ingredients so I looked around for a recipe that mostly relied on the things I had in the garden. I ended up adapting a gazpacho recipe from The Complete Book of Small Batch Preserving.
Garden fresh vegetables
My ingredients ended up being:
In the second batch I made, I added some white onion to change the flavor a bit. I liked both varieties.
My method:
Peel and seed cucumbers
Combine cucumbers and peppers (and onion if you’re using it) in a food processor
Use boiling water method to peel tomatoes. First you slice their skin and then dunk them in boiling water for about 30 – 45 seconds followed with an ice bath.
Add peeled and seeded tomatoes to the food processor and combine.
Add bread to food processor and combine.
At the end, add olive oil, salt, pepper and fresh basil to taste.
We then ate about half the batch and I froze the rest in a plastic container. A few days later I made another batch and froze it. Mmmm… garden vegetables.
Do you have a favorite gazpacho recipe I should try?
Our monster fig tree has ripened its first wave of figs. It seems to have been a short wave this time, but it has at least one more wave to go so there will be no shortage of figs.
In addition to giving away figs and eating them as many ways as I can think of (yogurt parfait, flatbread pizza, salad, plain, roasted with goat cheese…) I also went ahead and froze some. Mostly because I recall the deliciousness of a fig cake I made with frozen figs this past winter and I want to repeat the recipe.
Last year I froze some figs whole and some chopped up and mixed with a light coating of sugar. After baking with both kinds over the winter, I prefer the already chopped method so that’s what I did again. When chopping them, I cut off the skin where it’s completely green and pare down some of the white flesh parts because they can be somewhat bitter. I toss them in a bowl with a dusting of granulated sugar, spoon them into freezer bags and use a straw to suck out the excess air. Pretty easy and then they’re ready to freeze!
Chopped figs in a bowl.
Figs mixed with sugar.
Figs ready for the freezer.
The Feed Zone Cookbook, source of the original recipe
In recent bike training seasons I’ve found that I have to eat relatively simple foods while out on my rides. Power bar style foods haven’t been cutting it. I’ve found some products that I can buy like Thunderbird Energetica bars (cashew fig carrot is my favorite) and Honey Stinger chews that agree with me, but I’ve also been experimenting with making my own portable snacks. I recently picked up the Feed Zone Cookbook to help my experimentation. One recipe called savory bread cakes caught my interest since I have a special place in my heart for bread. I changed the recipe a bit of course, since I decided to omit the bacon.
Savory bread cakes
I halved the recipe to find out if I liked it or not. My recipe:
Mmmm… rosemary sourdough is delicious and give the bread cakes good flavor
First, cube the sourdough bread.
Pour the milk on the bread cubes and let it soak a bit.
Whisk up the eggs.
Add the eggs, cheese and salt to the bread and mix it up.
After greasing a bread pan, pour in the mixture. Bake at 350 until firm. About 25 minutes for my batch.
Finished bread cakes.
Sliced up, ready to eat.
After baking the bread cake, I let it cool, sliced it into four pieces and wrapped the pieces up in parchment paper and froze them. I ate one during my latest Bike MS training ride, the Real Ale Ride. The bread cake was soft by the time I stopped to eat it, so it definitely could not be eaten while riding, which I would have preferred. However, it was quite tasty. I might go with a bit less cheese next time because there were a few large cheddar chunks that I wasn’t too excited about eating in the heat.
Birthday desserts, ready to be eaten!
A few weeks ago, it was that time again. Time for the husband and I to jointly celebrate our birthdays by inviting people over and providing waaaaaayyyyy more desserts than the group could possibly consume. Last year’s selections were a hit and this year was no exception.
The menu:
We had left overs of everything. Luckily I hid some of the extra banana cream pie that wouldn’t fit in the pie pan, because that pie pan was clean by the end of the night!
Blueberry crumble cake (bottom left), banana cream pie (top), chocolate crazy cake (bottom right)
Chai cupcakes with cream cheese frosting
Fat free ginger cookies
First time using this nice pie pan. Definitely need to make banana cream pie again.
Crumbled graham crackers, sugar and mashed bananas made up the crust.
Crust ingredients mixed together
Crust pressed into pan and baked. The small white crocks were for the left over crust. The recipe made way too much for my pie pan.
Cooking the cream filling.
First layer of cream filling and first layer of bananas.
Second layer of cream filling and the final layer of banana slices. The pie then just had to set for hours in the fridge, so make this early if you decide to make it!
Cupcakes for my birthday!
I recently came across a recipe for these orange ginger cupcakes on Instructables that I just had to try. Conveniently, my birthday gave me a good excuse to bake something I wanted to eat, and then force my co-workers and softball teammates to eat it for me.
I edited the recipe a bit, to cut down on the butter of course. My next updates to this recipe will include using more orange zest and adding some chopped candied ginger to the batter. However, here’s the recipe I used for the pictured cupcakes. They were pretty good after all.
Ingredients – Orange ginger cupcakes
Ingredients – Buttercream frosting
Steps – Cupcakes
Steps – Frosting
Butter, applesauce and sugar mixed until fluffy.
Orange for the zest. I really like this little zester – it catches the zest and is easy to hold.
Batter after mixing in the eggs, and adding the zest.
Mixing in the dry ingredients.
Finished batter.
Cupcakes, pre-baking.
Cupcakes on the cooling rack.
Frosting in the mixer.
Yum!
So I know the Superbowl was like a month ago now, but I have some pictures from our party preparation ready to share. Because the Superbowl was played in New Orleans, we decided to make muffuletta sandwiches for our party guests. If you’re not familiar, a full size muffuletta sandwich will feed multiple people because it’s prepared on a very large round bun. I’ve never actually seen a muffuletta sandwich bun for sale anywhere, and I’ve been on a bread baking kick lately, so I decided to make two muffuletta buns for our sandwiches.
A giant muffuletta bun that takes up a whole plate.
Cut muffuletta bun
I used a recipe from about.com for the muffuletta buns that worked perfectly. We made both a vegetarian and a meat muffuletta for our party, as well as an italian sub and a portobello spinach sandwich. Among the sides, we made this very tasty marinated vegetable salad.
For the muffuletta, we created a very large amount of olive salad (recipe from Nola Cuisine) to top the sandwiches. It was delicious and we ate the left overs on salads for a few days after the party. The vegetarian muffuletta was vaguely based on this recipe, but I used the olive salad that we made. My husband used this recipe to make the meat muffuletta.
Veggie muffuletta
Start of the meat muffuletta. In the end, it had waaaaay more olive salad on top.
While baking beer sugar cookies for the party, I also roasted some garlic that I then used on the portobello and spinach sandwiches. The recipe for those sandwiches was loosely based on this recipe from Vegetarian Times, but I didn’t make the tofu spread. they were my favorite of the night actually.
Portobello, spinach, shallot, roasted garlic and cotija cheese sandwiches.
I’m still experimenting with bread baking, but I’ll have an update soon. Stay tuned!
Can you guess the surprise ingredient?
Now that you see the cookies, can you guess the surprise? Actually, they’ve got two surprises. One is that they were made with beer and the second is that I tried a butter substitution to make them healthier. I know that applesauce can be substituted for butter in many baking recipes, but applesauce makes cookies have a more cake-like texture. After reading suggestions, I settled on using mashed avocado to replace half of the butter in the recipe. That’s right, those cookies have avocado! You can almost make out a very faint green tint in the picture. I even served these beauties at our superbowl party and no one caught on to the fact that they had avocado in them. They disappeared like hot cakes. The cookies were pleasingly soft and delicious. Avocado are fruits after all, so their sweetness is a nice addition to baked goods. Even if they add a green tint.
Adapted from Bella Online
Ingredients:
Method:
Reduce beer of your choice by simmering on the stove top until consistency resembles syrup. This can take a while. Be careful not to let it boil over (from experience).
Preheat oven to 375 degrees and line your baking sheets with parchment paper.
Cream together sugar, butter, and mashed avocado until smooth and fluffy. Beat in egg and vanilla.
In another bowl, combine dry ingredients and mix together. Gradually mix in dry ingredients to the wet ingredients.
After all ingredients are combined, add beer syrup and stir it in by hand, the batter will look marbled.
Drop tablespoon sized scoops of cookie dough onto the baking sheets. Flatten down a bit (they don’t flatten out on their own much) and sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar mixture. Bake for 10 minutes, or until a bit golden and set in the middle. Place on racks to cool.
I used Winter Solstice Seasonal Ale from Anderson Valley Brewing, a winter warmer style.
Reducing the beer to syrup.
Getting ready to beat the butter, sugar, and avocado.
Wet ingredients all mixed up. Notice the slightly green batter.
After mixing in the dry ingredients.
Adding the beer syrup.
Marbled batter after mixing in the beer syrup.
Mmmm… the final, slightly healthier cookie.
The end product, amazing fig crumble cake.
Recently I realized that I had figs from last summer’s huge fig harvest in the freezer. Thank you me, for freezing those figs. I also recently purchased the Smitten Kitchen Cookbook and have been enamored with the recipes. A recipe for blueberry cornmeal butter cake caught my eye. I decided to adapt that recipe, using figs and less butter. I really love the simple flavor of the cake, the cornmeal and lemon zest combine with the figs to create pure deliciousness that’s hard to stop eating.
Fig crumble cake, adapted from Smitten Kitchen
Ingredients – cake:
Ingredients – crumble topping:
Process:
Butter and flour a cake pan, I used a 9″ round springform. (Edit: I’ve also found that a tube cake pan works well for making sure you get the middle cooked through) Whisk together the dry cake ingredients. Beat together the butter, sugar and applesauce until fluffy, which should take a few minutes. Mix in the eggs, vanilla, and lemon zest until thoroughly combined. Add a third of the flour mixture and all of the sour cream. Beat until blended. Add another third of the flour and beat until blended. Mix the remaining flour with the figs (or other fruit) and fold by hand into the batter until the flour mixture is combined into the batter.
Add the batter to the cake pan. Combine the crumble toppings and spread over the batter. Bake at 350 degrees until the top is brown and a toothpick comes out clean. The original recipe calls for 35 minutes, but for me it was more like 45 minutes.
Combining the applesauce, butter and sugar.
Adding the eggs.
Adding the dry mixture.
Adding the figs.
Batter in the pan.
Topped with crumble.
Yum!
Laura Makes 