On Figs and Beets

I’ve decided to share some of my food-related thoughts with you. By thoughts, I mean recipes, experiments, wonderings, discoveries, and, inevitably, failures and traumas. Basically, this is going to be my food diary.

Photo by: rhinoneal

Recently, I’ve taken my love for figs to a whole new level. I’ve always loved figs — like mangoes, they remind me of my childhood and my summers spent in Egypt. And like mangoes, they are a thoroughly un-Canadian fruit, and they are awfully expensive in the winter. So in these last few weeks of dreadful weather, I’ve resorted to consuming an awful lot of dried figs (make no mistake though, those are also pretty expensive).

So I made fig spice cupcakes, with a honey cinnamon buttercream icing, following this recipe, but tripling the amount of figs and cinnamon, doubling the amount of almond extract (that part was a mistake… I’m pretty clumsy), and cutting on the icing sugar in the buttercream (I used approximately two cups). They turned out pretty amazing (and I’m not just saying that — I’ve got a bunch of coworkers who can vouch for me). They were moist and quite figalicious, but the icing was definitely too sweet, so I will try to work on that next time.

Then, I made veal chops with a fig and red wine reduction, and a sweet potato, portobello mushroom, Brie cheese gratin, and some garlic asparagus, and it made me HAPPY.

And now, I still have two Tupperwares full of figs, and although I’d have no trouble eating them all in one sitting, I’m trying to decide what to make with them that would be interesting and innovative and that would enhance their unrivaled texture and flavour. I’ve made many different versions of (spiked) fig jams before, and I’m not really feeling the need to make that again. So if you’ve got any ideas, please share!

Also, I know this isn’t food-related, but I bought this fig candle last week and it smells AMAZING.

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And about beets… I’ve always thought I didn’t like beets, and it upset me, because they have such a gorgeous colour. But then a few months ago, I had a tartare of beets and salmon and feta at Pintxo (easily one of my favourite restaurants in the city, although I haven’t gotten around to reviewing it yet… “Perhaps you shouldn’t be wasting your time on this blog post, then?”; yes, perhaps you are right, but you can’t tell me what to do). Then a few weeks ago, I had a shockingly decadent dark chocolate and beet cupcake from Olive & Gourmando. And then, yesterday, a coworker forgot her bag of vegetables at work and asked me to take them home with me. And guess what? There were four beets in there! So this weekend, I will attempt to create something good out of them. But there is a big possiblity that I will mess it up, because I really don’t think I understand how beets work. Help?