Spinach Fig Salad Recipe

Summer is the season for salads. Some days it just gets too hot to turn on the stove. And you never get quite as hungry on those days anyway. A salad for dinner makes perfect sense. Still I am always challenged to figure out how to make salad feel like a meal. Especially without adding fish or grilled meats. Friday night was one of those salad nights. I had planned on making a chickpea and spinach dish but cooking was out of the question. A spinach salad was devised instead. Fortunately there were several delicious things on hand to make the salad something special. In this case Stilton cheese, red onions that were "bloomed" in vinegar, glazed pecans, and Mission figs. I think the secret to a salad that feels like a meal is a formula of three elements. First off it needs some protein. It can come in the form of grilled chicken or fish or even steak. Or it can come in the form of cheese or nuts or beans. The second element is layers of flavors. Just as a good vinaigrette ......

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Fig, Onion and Black Olive Tapenade:Recipe

I get a lot of good ideas from reading Craigslist Food Forum . Recently I read about an olive fig tapenade that people seem to be raving about. Needing an appetizer that could survive for a few hours without refrigeration, I figured it would fit the bill. The recipe originally comes from the "Jimtown Store Cookbook:Recipes from Sonoma County's Favorite Country Market", a recipe collection that also comes recommended by one of my favorite food bloggers--Heidi Swanson on her site 101 Cookbooks . Tapenade, a French condiment, is a thick rough paste typically made from capers, anchovies, olives, olive oil, and lemon juice. You can use it as a sandwich spread, to spread on bread, crackers or as a dip for raw vegetables. There is also an Italian version, olivada which is a simpler puree of black olives, olive oil and black pepper. Either way, because olives are so salty, combining them with sweet figs makes perfect sense. Though making it with a mortar and pestle is tradit......

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All About Figs

When I was growing up we had a fig tree in front of our house. My sister and I were avid tree climbers but I have to say, fig trees are pretty lousy for climbing. For one thing the branches are fairly slim and won't hold the weight of even one child let alone two. Then the ants. For some reason ants love fig trees, so climbing on a fig tree means climbing off the tree covered with ants. But somehow it still seemed worth it to get to the figs themselves. In parts of Asia and Africa the fig tree is referred to as a tree of life or knowledge. Buddhists, Christians, Jews and Moslems all talk about figs and fig trees in their sacred texts. The Greeks were positively obsessed with figs, believing them to be a gift from Demeter. In Italy the word fig is slang for female genitalia. It's really no surprise. Figs are a most bizarre and obscene looking fruit. So bizarre they're not technically fruit at all. Figs are flowers, if you open one up you can see they are filled with......

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