Summer fruit

 

My neighbor Joanne isn't a fan of figs, she told me when I offered her some.  That's one of summer's fruits going around the neighborhood these days...riches from another neighbor's garden, picked and passed door to door with gleeful anticipation while she's away.  "Oh, that's too bad," I said to Joanne after she'd confessed that she'd never had a taste for them.   More for me...selfish, I know.

Oh, don't worry...Amy of the fig tree knows about our indulgence in her fruit and encourages fig-loving neighbors to pick freely and indulge.  She's away, anyway. Figs, as far as I am concerned, are the high gift of summer.

Besides figs, here are some of the summer'largesse we've been trading:

Ratatouille   -   oops!  I gobbled up my portion of Kim's delicious offering too fast to take a photo...sorry!  

   

But I sure did snap a photo of Betty's  Pig Pie...it's from Bill Neal's Southern Cooking (the one with his photo, young among the foods he loved).  You will want that recipe, but first you need a biscuit cutter in the shape of a pig.  I've already ordered mine, even though I'm not much of a meat eater.

Summer fruit reigns here:  every morning, I have some variation...blueberries and cream, tomato and avocado toast, peaches and yogurt.

But figs...

My grandmother's fig tree stood in the back corner of her house.  I wish I had a photograph to show you.  My love for those pink-fleshed goblets of sweetness began there, certainly, and ever since, I've waited for August to come, even while early strawberries, then blueberries and raspberries, then peaches (my second in favorites) tumble onto the markets.

(Watermelon, too, but that's another story altogether...like corn and tomatoes and okra, it comes to the table to share summer's spotlight.)

I really can't remember how my grandmother used them, only that when the figs were ripe enough, we fought the birds for them, and tasted them off the tree. Slightly less-than-ripe ones were placed on the back porch sill.  Some years were leaner than others, a disappointment; others pulled the branches down with its largesse.

There are so many things you can do with figs...bake them in tarts and breads, carmelize and top them with brie, preserve them to serve with mascarpone and poached pears, dry them in baskets to send for winter gifts. But I don't see the point.

 Well, okay, I might make that fig salad in the photo above, which I clipped from a recipe site I can't remember the name of, now...if I had the patience to wait, or enough pounds of fig. It does look good and doesn't change (much) the nature of a fresh fig with too many adornments.  I'd probably leave the goat cheese out, though I love goat cheese.  No point in distracting me from the fig.

I'm not the only one with relish for a fresh fig.  With great generosity the other day, only minutes after a portion of Amy's figs arrived at my door, I shared them with a friend who does crave them as much as I; later, he told me, "I ate every one before I drove into the parking lot."