This Little Figgy Had Ice Cream

True confessions... I have never eaten a fresh fig. No particular aversion to them or anything like that, they just escaped me. Off my radar. I was a picky-eater as a kid, so maybe it's a stale mental-leftover from my childhood? Maybe it was just because they "looked funny". Who's to say? I was (am) also a very imaginative child, and figs, when quartered, have always reminded me of the ravenous houseplant in The Little Shop Of Horrors and/or the sand-worms of the desert planet Dune. When they're quartered and then cooked, they look like the undersides of starfish. None of those are images of things I'd really like to see on my dinner plate, then or now.

Once upon a time, I even lived in a house that had a fig tree smack-dab in the middle of the back yard. And yet I never ate of that tree. You see, it was my job to mow around it. It was exceptionally messy and it supported a healthy population of ants. This same yard also had a loquat tree sitting off to one side. Fig... loquat... lawn. At the time, I felt it was about the most useless yard in the world. Now I'm thinking that I might very well have been mowing around a goldmine. But what did I know?

What To Do With Dried Figs

I don't have a lot of experience using figs in my cooking or baking but the following recipes make me want to change all that. Of course, baked goods are a pretty easy sell. I haven't met many of those that I didn't like. Fresh figs don't come out until late summer, but dried figs can theoretically be found any time of year.

• Figgy Buckwheat Scones from 101 Cookbooks - includes a recipe for Fig Butter cooked with port.
• St. Joseph's Fig Cookies at SeriousEats.com come from Sicily via New Orleans. These look so much better than Fig Newtons.
  
• Also from SeriousEats.com are these Fig & Almond Cookies that also look really tasty.
• Bread Pudding with Dried Fruit and Créme Anglaise on page 273 of Williams - Sonoma: Entertaining (2004).