Fig!

The figs are late this year, but now they have arrived with a vengence. I am sure I have picked at least 100 pounds from the tree in my backyard.

As a fervent lover of all things Italian, I was thrilled when, it must be ten years ago at least when I was in Venice with my daughter, I looked out my window at the small hotel where we stayed and saw a tree identical to the one in our backyard on central Vancouver Island.

So what do you do with 100 lbs of figs? My dryer has been going 24/7 for weeks; one year my husband made fig wine which, strangely, is not sweet at all, (all the sugar has been turned into alcohol!); and my fig and ginger jam is a favourite among a certain group of friends - mostly Italians and Brits.

I love them fresh off the tree too - but that is an aquired taste.

So here for anyone with a surplus of figs, is my recipe for

FIG AND GINGER JAM

- put clean canning jars into an ovenproof dish, fill dish and jars with boiling water and put in a 220 degree oven while you make the jam.

INGREDIENTS


• 6 cups of ripe figs, diced


• 6 cups of sugar


• 1 1/2 tbsp ground ginger


• 1 cooking apple, peeled and diced


• 4 tbsp grystalized ginger, chopped


• 5 tbsp cider vinegar


• juice of 3 lemons


• 1 cup water

- put all of the ingredients in a large pot and heat at a medium boil for 20 minutes. Meanwhile put jar rings into a pot of water and boil gently. Add pop-tops 5 minutes before jam is ready to put in jars.

- spoon jam into the sterilized jars from the oven, wipe the rim, put on sterilized tops and finger tighten rings. Set on rack to cool. Don't touch them until they pop, and don't retighten lids for fear of disturbing the seal.

- store in a cool dark place for a month to allow the flavours to mingle.

Enjoy on toast, with chicken or meat, your favourite cheese and crackers, or any way you want!

I have posted photos on my blog before, but have not really talked about how important photography has been to my writing vision. In a literal way it is my vision, i.e. how I see.

I first took up photography in the early 1980’s at a local community college and have always used it as an escape, a record and an adjunct to whatever my current big life project has been, whether recording historic landmarks for a community record, composing subjects for paintings, using photos in my paintings, or as an adjunct and inspiration for my writing.

Photographs were a natural fit when I started writing travel articles, and I maintain a website of travel photos at www.judyhudsonphotos.com.

Although I still live in the same general area on Vancouver Island as the setting of my first story, ( working title, Summer of Fortune) I often looked through my photos of Honeymoon Bay to get in the mood to write. I have previously posted some photos of the March Farm in Honeymoon Bay, which was the inspiration for the story.

In another book I am working on, a Yucatan murder mystery, the photographs of my trips to the Maya Riviera and Maya ruins have been invaluable in putting me back in the location of the book, ruins in the jungle near a small Maya village. I look back at the interiors of the houses, the people I met, and the local flora, and it evokes the place in all its glorious detail, and I am there again.

You don’t have to be a professional photographer. It doesn’t matter how good your photographs are. What you see in the photos is what you saw through the lens, and it will spark memories for you. The simplest cameras, available for under $100, will take great pictures, point and shoot, straight out of the box. It is easy to learn how to unload the memory card straight onto your computer, set the screensaver to the file the pictures are in, (find them by hitting the ‘browse’ button in the screensaver page in the control panel) and you will be back in your location every time you return to your workstation.

It works for me, it might work for you too.

Back to work. Judy

A story is woven from the threads of your life. Or at least mine are.

I stumbled across the recipe for Children’s Delight cookies in my recipe binder. It had been there forever, but I don’t make as many cookies now as when my children were small, so I haven’t noticed it for years. It brought back a rush of memories. First, it is definitely in my mother’s handwriting. Seeing it on the page is like seeing her face. It makes me long for the days when we used to get letters and just seeing the handwriting would bring the person home. But that’s another story. The recipe card was stained and had comments written in after the fact (more butter!). And up in the corner, in brackets it says “Raylene Ewing”

Raylene was my good friend, maybe my best friend, for a while in about grades seven and eight, when I was living in Toronto. She lived just up the street and was not one of the popular kids, but then neither was I. I don’t connect her to the cookies per se, but just seeing her name was an emotional blast from the past – in a nice way. Needless to say, I made the cookies, an old fashioned drop cookie that makes the kitchen smell like cinnamon and cloves.

I didn’t plan to put the recipe in the book I was working on, Summer of Fortune, but a week or so later, there it was. (You writers out there know what I mean.)

“On the top shelf rested a wooden box. Stretching to her full height she carefully brought it down, wiping the dust from the top. She held it in one hand, studying the scenes of the lake carved into the lid. Inside, yellowing recipe cards were written in a spidery hand: Sunday Blackberry Cake, October Relish, Children’s Delight Cookies.”

The recipes themselves were not the important part at that point, but are rather an introduction to Maddie’s backstory.

“Maddie didn’t have any hand-me-down recipes. Most of hers came from magazines. These recipe names conjured up visions of a woman in an apron with streaks of flour on her face, like a character in an old movie. Her own mother had never cooked and Maddie was sure she didn’t own an apron. She had spent most of her time on the couch, watching her soaps with a beer in her hand. Maddie inhaled deeply the unfamiliar scent of cinnamon and cloves that lingered in the box, and then, closing the lid, she placed the box on the windowsill over the sink where she could admire the carving.”

And didn’t she make them, again and again, a sensory lure her handsome landlord couldn’t resist.

And the box? Well that’s a whole other post.

Here’s the recipe. Enjoy – if you can read my Mother’s handwriting! (Are you out there Raylene?)

My question to you is – what mundane everyday things have inspired you, to the point that they later turned up in your writing?

Until next time, Judy Hudson