I recently asked Dad to text me some of the recipes for foods I remember making with my mother when I was younger. He sent me several snapshots of recipes, and even a photo of a lock of my childhood hair that my mother had tucked away in the recipe box in a blue envelope.
After work on Thursday, I swung by our local grocery store on the way home from work to pick up some jars for canning. I’ve been meaning to make some fig preserves before the figs are all dried up. Right now, the blue swallowtails are feasting on the fermented figs like it’s some kind of heavenly all-you-can-eat buffet, and I needed to pick the last of the fig harvest for this year for some recipes. I settled on Fig Marmalade.
I picked the figs from my towering fig tree that I purchased for $3.00 from a scratch-and-dent clearance cart on the side of the plant section in Home Depot over a decade ago.
I sterilized some jelly jars and lids by boiling them while I chopped the figs, simmered the lemons, grated the orange rind, and squeezed the juice.
For this recipe, I used pure cane sugar instead of regular granulated sugar. I boiled it, then simmered on low for about an hour and a half until it got thick (the recipe says 30 minutes, but I wanted mine thicker). Then, I scooped it into canning jars with seals on the lids and labeled the tops.
Since we usually have breakfast for supper a couple of times a week, we consume a lot of jelly with our toast. I’ve also used it to put on brie with crackers. I used one of my mother’s old measuring cups that we’d used together as I made the marmalade (it has a chip in one place that feels a lot like an age wrinkle), so it has her hand in it, too. This will surely bring back all the memories and feels of my childhood fig marmalade.
Toast, anyone?
Common Threads 