Oh yes! This is one of the fig trees full of fruit; it is so tall that we need ladders to reach the middle and upper branches.
And I guess there is only one way to deal with the fig invasion that has taken over my mom's garden this year. Maybe there are two, actually:
One - leave them on the tree so the birds eat the fruits.
Two - pick them and consume them.
But that's not so easy because figs are a bit difficult to consume in large quantities. More precisely, all of us in the house can't eat as many figs as there are.
Figs ripen in stages. For example, in one week, you can harvest several kilograms of figs. On a daily basis, it is like a bowl full of fruits. It lasts for a week or a bit more, and then nothing, you have to wait for the next round, when the same happens again. So, the tricky thing is to preserve these figs in some way if you can't consume them all.
As my mother likes marmalade, she came up with several recipes for it. Our first attempt to prepare marmalade from figs happened a few years ago. I was present as it was summer, and I was here visiting them. In that version, she put half a lemon into the mass, as the fig alone does not have a special, distinctive taste. With lemon, it was okayish.
The next attempt included orange. We grated the orange peel and also squeezed the orange juice into the marmalade mass. This edition of marmalade has already acquired a different, more interesting taste. I noticed a slight bitterness from the orange peel, so the next batch went without the peel, even though the entire inside of the orange was ground and added to the chopped fig mass before making the marmalade.
The very last edition of fig marmalade contains pineapple. I know, it sounds like a weird combination, but this indeed is quite refreshing. What I hold in my hand for this photo is one jar of fig jam made a few days ago, with pineapple.
Apart from these marmalade adventures, there are different ways to prepare & consume figs. My dad found a recipe on the internet to "bake" them in an oven. You have to cut them in half, sprinkle them with a little sugar to caramelise them, as was the case here, or drizzle them with a little honey.
When they were baked, after some 35 minutes, we let them cool down for some time. I added some lemon and tried. Well, it was not bad, but too sweet for my taste.
That day, after lunch and tasting the oven-baked figs, I was still thinking about how we could prepare the rest of the figs - still one full bowl of them in the fridge. I know my mom used to prepare apple cakes, like a pie. The dough is placed in a pan, then sour apples with cinnamon are arranged, and the dough is again placed on top. Perhaps the same could be prepared with figs instead of apples, with cinnamon and lemon, or combine figs with some other sour fruit. That would be our next experiment these days.
But maybe you have another creative idea, what to do with the amount of figs that you cannot consume fresh? If yes, please be kind and leave the idea in the comment section... or come and help us eat all these figs. 馃槀
