a story about my favorite people and ripe figs
there's a recipe, too, and it involves ice cream
If you’ve been paying attention, you might notice this post looks a little different, and the site looks a little different, too. I’m trying a new look — a little cleaner and (I think) a lot prettier. I hope it doesn’t offend anyone’s sensibilities. Nothing else is changing around here — except I may attempt to lend this space even more of my time. Nearly six months in to writing here consistently, it’s become the highlight of my week. I’m so grateful to everyone who takes the time to read.
Until last weekend, I couldn’t have told you a single thing I’d ever eaten at a bachelorette party. I remember sitting on the stoop outside Dat Dog on Frenchmen Street in New Orleans, but I don’t have any recollection of the hot dog I snarfed to ward off a hangover. I remember looking at a check in Las Vegas and wondering how my wallet was going to recover, but I have no idea where we ate or what I ordered. There was a beautiful Mexican meal cooked by professional chefs at a sprawling Airbnb in Palm Springs, and I wonder if I would remember anything about it if I hadn’t gotten so excited about a wine tasting beforehand.
But I suspect I’ll remember one thing I ate last weekend, at a bachelorette party that happened to be my own. A bachelorette party I almost didn’t have.
My husband and I got married pretty quickly last year, six months after he proposed, and we decided on a 10-month lag between the ceremony and the reception. That meant there was no time for a bachelorette party before we were officially hitched, and for a while I considered skipping one altogether, in the interest of not jumbling up the celebration timeline even more. Also: I’m 35, I’m still not sure what a bachelorette even is, and I’m deathly allergic to attention.
Eventually, though, I saw some sense in the celebration. When else would I get the chance to gather my favorite women in the same house for an entire weekend? Six of my closest friends, whom I’ve known for a combined 158 years, the equivalent of a lifetime and more — it was too much to pass up, even if I wasn’t sure what the weekend would involve.
We’re well past the age where we’re willing to pretend to have fun at clubs. We get heartburn and Botox. We scroll Zillow. So for most of the weekend, we laughed and ate and sipped wine, sometimes a little too fast — but only just a little. We shared beds and lapsed into 20-year-old habits we didn’t know we hadn’t kicked. I wore the t-shirt from my kindergarten field day and shorts I’ve owned since I was 16, because the past really isn’t so hard to slip on.
My friends have grown up into wildly unique people, fleshed-out versions of the dreams we hatched in St. Louis two decades ago. But one thing we have in common — one thing that’s always been true about all of us — is our propensity to provide. We mix cocktails and make salad and raise our hands all at once to run to the grocery store for a red onion. All weekend, my glass was full, and someone was handing me a cookie or offering to put bacon in the oven.
And maybe I’ll remember the cookies and the bacon and the way the grill smoked so thick I worried I’d start a grease fire while making burgers. But I know I’ll remember the figs.
At some point during the weekend, I noticed the massive tree at the end of our rental house’s driveway was laden with figs. At first, I thought they were all green, weeks away from being edible. But as I walked under the tree, I saw the entire backside was weighed down with heavy, ripe, purple-black fruit. Some was past its prime, and wasps feasted on the sugary remains. It felt like I had to pick some, like the tree needed me to. So I took a shopping bag and started plucking figs from branches. I got sticky and hot and wound up with several pounds worth. I wondered if I’d have time to do something with the fruit. I hoped I would. And the next night, after a day of wine and beer and oysters a whole assortment of crab-centric appetizers, we ended up back home before 10 p.m. There was vanilla ice cream in the freezer, so I set the oven and started slicing figs.
What I ended up with was a molten lava of fruit, cooked down to perfection. At the end of a weekend of when everyone fussed over me, I got the last surprise. I may have winced every time someone told a waiter it was my bachelorette party — try as I might, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m too old to be anything that ends in an -ette — but if a bachelorette party means eating figgy ice cream in pajamas before midnight on an oversized couch with people I love, well, I’ll have one every year.
warm figs over vanilla ice cream
serves: 2
prep time: 5 minutes
cook time: 25 minutes
I went into this recipe with no clue what types of figs I was using; they were simply the figs outside my window at an Airbnb. After doing some research, I’m pretty sure they were celeste figs, which means they were a bit sweeter than the brown turkey figs I found at my grocery store when I recreated the recipe a few days later. I’d recommend using the sweetest figs you can find — celeste or black mission, preferably — and cooking them when they’re truly ripe, right before they descend into mush. That’s a hard line to tow, and if you can’t get your hands on the perfect figs, there are workarounds. For less-ripe figs, which will still have a stripe or hint of green to their color, cook them at a lower temperature (say, 300) for longer. You want to give them more time to break down without allowing the sugar to burn.
The beauty of this extremely simple recipe is the contrasting texture: The ice cream is smooth and melty, and the fig seeds give an amazing crunch — actually, thousands of amazing, tiny crunches in each bite, it feels like.
Preheat the oven to 350°F.
Wash 8 figs and cut them into half-inch square-ish pieces — about six pieces per fig.
Scatter the figs on a quarter baking sheet, and toss them with 2 tablespoons of brown sugar, coating them and making sure there’s no loose sugar on the sheet. Push the figs together so that they’re in a single layer but tightly clustered.
Bake them for about 25 minutes, maybe a bit longer, stirring with a wooden spoon after 10 minutes and again at the 25-minute mark if you’re going to keep going. (After you stir, try to keep the figs in that single layer, clustered position, but it’s less crucial as they start to break down.) The figs are done when they’re bubbling and a little bit syrupy at the edges, as if they’re about halfway to being jam.
Scoop vanilla ice cream into two bowls, and place the warm figs on top. Don’t wait for them to cool!
Great piece!