Figgy Jam Muffins for #MuffinMonday

Fig jam adds a lovely sweetness to these fluffy muffins. Smear on a little more butter and call these breakfast or mid-morning snack. Perfect with a cup of hot coffee or tea.

This summer, for the first time in as long as I can remember, I didn’t go home home, to the little town where I was born. The town of homemade Tabasco sauce and fig preserves, of TG&Y and Easter baskets, of Christmas stockings and eggnog, of grape Crush and Maytag service calls, of vegetable gardens and crawfish, of freedom and backyard bonfires, of first cousins and bubblegum snow cones. Some of my happiest childhood memories hang like Spanish moss from ancient oaks in the New Iberia city park on the Bayou Teche. No matter where I live, I always go home home each summer to visit my grandparents, until finally, last summer, in my 51st year, I didn’t have one anymore.

A few years ago, I happened to be there over the Fourth of July holiday and it occurred to me that it had probably been years since my grandparents had seen fireworks. So we loaded up the car and found ourselves a spot on the bayou that would give us a good view of the city show. We took the seats out of the back of the minivan and set them up like comfy chairs for the old folks to sit on. And together, four generations ooohed and aaahed in the rockets’ red glare, some of us still children, all of us like kids again.

Part of the joy of writing this blog is the satisfaction that comes from searching my own memory and making connections with my heritage and those old folks I miss, even while adapting to what I have available. Figs weren’t wonderful this summer and the sad few I did buy and eat seemed weirdly dry and flavorless, so there was no point in making preserves. But I couldn’t let the season pass without something figgy to enjoy, even if it meant using store-bought jam. As the saying goes, needs must.

Ingredients 

2 cups or 250g flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 cup or 50g sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 egg
1/3 cup or 75g butter, melted and cooled
1/2 cup or 160g fig jam
1/2 cup or 120ml milk

To garnish: Several dried Black Mission figs, optional

Method
Preheat your oven to 350°F or 180°C.  Butter your muffin pan or line it with paper liners.

Combine the flour, sugar, salt and baking powder in a large mixing bowl.

In another smaller bowl, whisk together the egg, melted butter, fig jam and milk

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ones and stir until just mixed through.

Divide the mixture between the muffin cups.

Top with a slice of soft dried Mission fig, if desired.

Bake in your preheated oven for 18-22 minutes or until golden.

Allow the muffins to cool for a few minutes then remove them to a wire rack to cool completely.

Enjoy! If you celebrate Fourth of July, who are you watching the fireworks with this year?

They smell soooo good! 

Gram’s Fig Preserves

When figs are in season, make this simple recipe for fresh fig preserves, and enjoy sweet figs all year long! Gram's fig preserves are great spread on a piece of buttered toast, spooned over pound cake or even baked into her special fig spice cake. 

This is a hard post to write without getting maudlin but I will try.  As my handful of Twitter followers and Facebook friends know, we spent last weekend in New Iberia, Louisiana with my aged grandmother. She is 98 1/2 years old which means (thanks to my friend, Jacky’s Gran, who started counting the year she was in at 93, rather than birthdays) she is in her 99^th year. Pretty impressive, I think!

My father and aunt have organized a lovely nurse/caretaker to come in Monday through Friday to care for her while my uncle, who lives with her, is off at work. On the evenings and weekends, he is in charge and is doing a good job. As we said to him, upon questions about the medications, he hasn’t killed her yet, so we figure he knows what he is doing. (Why he didn’t throw us out, I do not know.) Goodness knows, she has two different sets of pills, morning and evening, and if he can keep those straight, more power to him! We are grateful!

We arrived around 3:45 in the afternoon on Friday and her lovely nurse/caretaker, Tina, was still there to greet us. Bless her, then she stayed late just to make conversation and get to know us because her normal hours are 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.  She calls my grandmother Ms. Margaret.

Her real name is Marguerite but throughout my childhood, her friends called her Mag or Maggie. On official records, her name is Margaret because when she started school back in 1919, French was forbidden and Marguerite would have been part of that prohibition. Her name was changed to Margaret to conform to the no-French rule. Imagine!

Both my maternal grandfather and my paternal grandmother did not learn English till they started school at six years old and the system - and the teachers - tried to stamp it out of them. The shame of that was that the next two generations of Acadiana French children were not allowed to speak their mother tongue at school and gradually it died out. (My grandparents’ generation still spoke it amongst themselves because it is hard to smother a child’s mother tongue.) I think my grandparents’ generation was the last to speak it fluently in Louisiana. I’ve been told that the public schools are teaching French again, but it is not the same. More's the pity.

Anyhoo, Tina got us talking about the character that my grandmother must have been when she was younger and telling stories on her. Oh, my goodness, the stories we could tell. Gram was the best grandmother ever. No was not in her vocabulary. “Gram, can we have some baby aspirin? (They tasted like orange Tic Tacs and we loved them.) The answer was “Sure. Help yourself.”

“Gram, can we borrow your steak knives? We want to have a knife throwing contest in the yard.”  - “You know where they are.”  I don’t even remember her saying, “just be careful.”  But, in fairness, possibly she did. And we lit bonfires, with permission – we mostly did ask, to our credit - and took group bubble baths and climbed trees, higher than was ever safe. And once we even took off walking to my other grandmother’s house a few miles away. Why? Who the heck remembers? Unsupervised much? Blissfully so. 

While cooking in my grandmother’s kitchen this past weekend, I discovered a drawer full of her old cookbooks and asked if I might take them home to look through them more carefully. (Cousins reading this, please know that I WILL RETURN THEM.) You know that the woman who let us take her steak knives in the yard for a knife-throwing contest (which, by the way, ended up with a knife up in my foot and a tetanus shot for yours truly) did not tell me no.  So I have a whole box of mostly cr*p cookbooks with the occasional gem in her handwriting, which is what I am looking for.

I discovered this one before we even left her kitchen.  Written on the front of a Steen Syrup giveaway pamphlet in my grandmother's handwriting. 

“Gram,” I said.  “Is this your recipe for the fig preserves you always made?”  “Yes,” she said.  It couldn’t be more simple.

Gram’s Fig Preserves

It doesn't get any easier than this - just two ingredients - figs and sugar - in a two to one ratio, for a whole lot of wonderful.

Ingredients - to make two pint jars

2.2 pounds or 1 kg or 5 1/2 generous cups of fresh figs

2 3/4 cups or 620g sugar

Method

Rinse the fresh figs well and discard the rinsing water. If your figs have hard stems, cut them off and discard.

Pour the sugar over the drained figs in a heavy-bottomed pot.

Put it on a medium flame, covered. You don't need to add water as this gets really juicy fairly quickly but that is a good thing. Cook for a while, perhaps half an hour, stirring very gently occasionally. You do not want the figs to break up. Gram always had whole figs in her preserve jars and so should you.

After about the first half hour, when all the sugar has dissolved, you can turn the heat up to medium high and take the lid off.  Cook until the syrup reduces by at least half.

Meanwhile, sterilize your jars/lids by pouring boiling water in them.  Then put one metal teaspoon in each jar.  This will keep the jars from breaking when you pour the boiling hot preserves in them.

2 half pint jars and 1 pint jar

When I cooked this down, I got 2 whole pints of preserved figs out of 5 1/2 cups or 1 kilo of figs and 2 3/4 cups or 620g of sugar.

Using a jam jar funnel, divide the figs and boiling syrup evenly between the jars.  Screw the lids on very tightly, with a dry towel and set them upside down.  As they cool, a vacuum seal will form and the preserves will be safe to eat for several weeks.

We bought the fresh figs at the Farmers’ Market on Main Street in New Iberia because Gram’s tree was hit by lightening a number of years ago and her replacement trees (planted with cuttings from my other grandmother’s tree!) are not producing yet. I’ve decided that the best thing I could do was to pack them up nicely and mail them on to her to enjoy. When you are 98 and 1/2, people should be making fig preserves for you. Don’t you agree?

Enjoy!

Chicken and Sausage Gumbo

Chicken and sausage gumbo made easy, with authentic Cajun taste. Make a pot for your next party and serve it in cups! 

Dark roux and gumbo is the smell of my grandmother’s house in New Iberia after a long drive from Houston in the winter and the warmth of family greetings and big hugs.  My grandmother is gone now, but gumbo simmering on the stove brings me back to her big round kitchen table where she always sat, chopping and dicing and preparing vegetables or stuffing a roast for the next meal.

My maternal grandmother, Wanda Fleming Gautreaux, sitting in her usual chair in her yellow kitchen.
Being in that yellow kitchen with her made me happy!

And some of my fondest college memories are of visits from my College Station/Houston/Beaumont friends who would come to Austin for the weekend.  Sometimes we went out to enjoy the nightlife of Sixth Street but more often than not, we would stay in, have a number of drinks and make chicken and sausage gumbo.  Truly, I am never happier than when I am in the kitchen, surrounded by friends and family, perhaps sipping some red wine, and stirring a roux.

In most gumbo recipes, you are supposed to cut the chicken in pieces and brown it first.  Unfortunately, I usually find myself starting with the bird still frozen, (Who can remember to take anything out of the freezer in the morning!) so I have developed this method.   Yesterday, I didn’t have a frozen bird, but I stuck to my usual program anyway.

Ingredients

3 1/2 pound or 1 1/2 kilo chicken (If you can find a hen, use her instead. More flavor.) 

Additional chicken breasts (optional)

1 lb or about 500g smoked sausage, sliced in rounds, about ½ inch thick

2 medium onions

1 green bell pepper (capsicum)

4 celery sticks, de-stringed

1 1/2 cups or 190g plain flour

1 cup or 240ml oil (I prefer canola.)

Sea salt

Black pepper

Cayenne

Chicken bouillon or stock cubes

For serving: Light sprinkling of gumbo filé. 

Method

Put whole (frozen or not) chicken to boil in pot with about a gallon of water, about 2 teaspoons of salt and good couple of grinds of fresh black pepper. (If it is frozen and you can’t get the bag of giblets out, don’t worry.  Keep checking back and get it out when the chicken thaws enough.)

Chop onions, bell pepper and celery and put aside in one bowl for later.

My bell pepper looks a little frozen because it was.  I chopped it over the weekend when I thought I was going to make gumbo but, then, couldn't find celery.  As long you are not using it for salad, bell pepper keeps great in the freezer.  So do onions and celery, for that matter. 

In separate pot, preferably a black iron skillet or some other heavy gauge vessel, mix flour and oil.  This is called the roux.  Cook over medium to medium high heat, stirring frequently with a wooden spoon, until roux begins to turn brown. 

0 minutes

7 minutes

12 minutes

14 minutes

18 minutes

20 minutes

22 minutes

24 minutes

 Depending on temperature and the thickness of your pot, you may have to stir constantly because roux has a tendency to burn.  A medium heat is safer; it just takes longer.  Continue cooking until the roux turns a very dark, chocolate brown.  Should the roux burn (Everyone does it at least once, so don’t feel too bad.) toss it out and start again, otherwise the entire gumbo will have that burnt taste.

27 minutes - it looks delicious but do NOT try to taste it.  It's hotter than the hinges of hell
and will burn your mouth off.  Also it doesn't actually taste good. 

The roux will be VERY hot so be careful when handling it and try to stir without splashing on yourself or nearby “helpers.” 

In fact, it's best if you make the helpers go sit on their beds. 

Add the chopped vegetables and stir. This cools your roux down without too much spitting.

By this time your chicken (or hen) should be falling off its bones.  (If not, turn the roux off, giving it a couple of more stirs, and let the chicken boil for a little longer.)  A good sized hen may take up to two hours to fall off her bones. 

Take the chicken out of the pot, leaving behind the stock, and allow it to cool until you can handle it.  Discard bones and skin, leaving meat in fairly large chunks.

Add stock from the chicken pot gradually to the roux.  Never add roux to stock, always stock to roux.  It may bubble up considerably, depending on how hot your roux is, so when I say gradually, I do mean ladle by ladle.  Stir between ladles.

When the roux has thinned considerably, then you can add the whole mixture back into the stockpot.

Add the sliced sausage.  And the additional chicken breasts if desired.

I cut these into fairly large chunks so they don't disintegrate into shredded chicken. 

Let simmer until the sausage and breasts, if using, are cooked and you are ready to eat.  Depending upon how fatty your sausage is, you might need to use a serving spoon to skim the oil off of the top of the gumbo before serving.

Add the deboned chicken meat and make sure it is warmed through.  Add chicken cubes, as necessary, instead of salt, for more flavor.  Add freshly ground black pepper and cayenne to taste.

Serve in bowls over a large spoonful of cooked white rice with a couple of drops of hot sauce and a sprinkle of gumbo filé (ground sassafras leaves), if you have it.   We also often serve with fresh baguette slices to dip. 

Enjoy!