Green Fig Jam

After many years of looking rather miserable, our little fig shrub finally produced a reasonable number of figs this year and I was looking forward to trying my hand at fig jam. I counted 33 tiny figs.

Of course the Summers aren't sufficiently long and hot for the fruit to ripen, so I searched for what one could do with unripened figs and found a Bulgarian recipe that seemed compelling. The original article is here and is in Bulgarian and very random in the amounts of the recipe, so no wonder it didn't work out at all. I don't want to throw it away though and I've no idea how to use it up either, so it'll remain in the fridge for now.

I can't remember what goes for picking ripe figs, but when it comes to green/unripe ones, they need to be cut and they release a lot of white substance, which is said to be quite an irritant to the skin and difficult to wash off. So I used gloves to harvest them. That milky substance was sticky.

Because the jam recipe was so poor, I'm not going to even attempt to write it up with corrections, but I want to mention the bit that I really liked about this recipe - the addition of whole almonds, pushed into each fig, "à la grecque" or Greek style. This is a really nice idea for when making jam with whole fruit and when I find a good recipe for that, I'll give it a try again.