KITCHEN ADVENTURE: IF WE WERE ALL LITTLE FIGGIES THEN WE’D SING FIGGY-WIGGY-WIGGY-WIGGY-WOO! You know, people always say these are their favorite posts….

Anyway, not sure what to say about this adventure. It wasn’t a complete success, but neither was it a complete failure; so if you have any thoughts on resolving the main problem, drop me a line.

Roasted Figs with Goat Cheese. The recipe (from Food and Wine) was stupidly easy: Preheat the oven to 425. Cut the figs as if you were going to quarter them, but only cut 3/4 of the way down, so the quarters are still held together at the bottom. Stuff the figs with goat cheese, roast (“in an oiled pan,” but I just used a foil-covered pan) for 12 minutes, and drizzle with warmed honey. Note that you really don’t need a lot of goat cheese–I bought too much. Many goat cheese sandwiches are in my future.

The first time around, these were a bit too sweet. The bigger problem, though, was the fine grit on the outside of the figs.

No problem, I thought, I’ll just wash them. So the next time I made the recipe, I washed the figs carefully, then roasted them with the goat cheese, quite a bit of black pepper, and a dash of cinnamon. No honey. This flavor combination was much better, and there was a lot less grit… but it was still a slight problem. Did I just need to wash them even more, or try a new batch of figs, or what?? The sweet/goaty combination is a lot of fun, so I’d like to learn to do these better.

Also, these look super elegant in the cookbook picture, but actually they have a tendency to fall over during cooking, so they serve up a little sloppy.