There's this rangy fig tree in the middle of the driveway here at home. When I first bought the house I thought that maybe it should be ripped out because it's kind of in the way. Anyway it has been left there and for the past so many months little buds have appeared all over it. Tiny tantalising figs. There were so many of them that I wondered if you're meant to thin them so that the remaining ones reach a decent size, but as usual, I did nothing.  And despite that, the little buds have grown and grown. For the past oh two months or so they've been so big I've been reckoning they were just days away from being ripe. Alas no. They were still hard as rocks.

Then all of a sudden at the start of this week little finches descended upon our tree announcing that the figs were now ready for the picking.  I picked 14 figs yesterday and made 2 jars of fig jam. It even tastes like real fig jam. I used the recipe off the sbs website and as a bonus discovered a series called 'Gourmet Farmer' about Matthew Evans, a Sydney food critic who traded in the city life for a small subsistence farm in Tasmania. It chronicles a year of living off only the food he grows himself and that which he can source in Tassie.  I watched two episodes on the website last night while I prepared the jam from my homegrown figs, feeling like somewhat of a kindred spirit.

Today I've picked 13 figs and there's still a tree full of them,  so I'm googling recipes for fig paste and how to sun dry figs.  We're also experimenting with barbequed figs sprinkled in brown sugar and served with a blob of double cream. Not too bad although I think the recipe could be improved with some vanilla bean or cinnamon. The figs on the barbeque concept was an extension of the 'apple wrapped in alfoil on the coals' concept we've been working on as a way to get through the bags of apples we've received from Di and Joe. Already we are apple crumbled out, so we're trying new things and welcome any new apple recipe suggestions. Maybe we can borrow a dehydrator from someone and dry a whole heap of fruit at once. Who knows what other solutions we'll come up with to help solve our abundance dilemma!!!