I love figs. Love love love figs. I will eat them in a car, in a bar, in a boat on a moat...I love them.
Until yesterday, I'd actually never had them outside newtons or preserves. Weird, huh? So when I saw this recipe, I thought the chicken would have a sort of figgy glaze and the overall experience would be crunchy and sweet and make me want to sing about bringing me figgy pudding RIGHT NOW. Not so! While the dish was still delicious, the sweetness of the figs was sort of hidden under the savoriness of the rest of the ingredients. Each fig was like a crunchy, sweet little spy in a dish otherwise comprised of exotic spices and flavors. I'll show you.
Browned chicken in the baking pan.
Fig sauce cooking.
Figs with the sauce, pre baking.
Post baking. Now, the recipe said the sauce would thicken a bit...I didn't get that. It wasn't bad, but it definitely wasn't thick by any definition.
Chicken with minute rice. Because the rice cooker was dirty, I was hungry, and I wanted to make Ryan squirm. The figs, you can see, are crispy on the top from baking. They were simply wonderful. They soaked up enough of the surrounding liquid to get a slightly more savory flavor, but not so much as to completely overwhelm their inner sweetness. I felt like the sauce could have been more flavorful though...I'd maybe try adding more of the spices next time.
Ahhh...disillusionment.
In this picture, we see proof that, in case you were still under the misguided notion that I rarely fail largely in the kitchen, you're wrong. I fail. I make smoke. I burn stuff that's not even food sometimes. And to this day, I ALWAYS turn on the wrong d@mn burner on the left side of the stove. Every. Single. Time.
Moving on. I made candied ginger cookies last night as well. They are SO good. Next time I'll definitely run the candied ginger through a food processor first though...the chunks were big and a bit intense, but still edible.
I'll definitely be making these for the Christmas party. They made the house smell SO good.
So that was my Friday night. Along with some sewing stuff that'll go in the other blog. What'd you make?
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