Figs, figs, figs

Digression: Every year, I'm struck by the ways in which each season in Sonoma County is individual and unique. This, of course, is hardly news to the oenophile, for whom vintage can at times be as fundamental as terroir in differentiating quality and character of a wine; and certainly, as a region beholden to the economics of grape-growing, all of us here in the County are aware of the climatological particulars of each year's growing season. However, it is cooking (or, to be more precise, shopping for the foods with which to cook) that has taught me the strange and wonderful ways in which the vagaries of weather come to life in the farmers' stalls at our local markets. My unscientific and largely baseless hypothesis is that the defining characteristic of the 2010 growing season will turn out to be a relatively cool and wet spring: Our average temperature has been about 3 degrees lower, and our cumulative precipitation about 4" higher, than normal. Ripening will run late, and yields appear to be low for grapes but, for reasons that elude me, very, VERY high for the common fig.

In any case, what I know definitively is this: Our personal crop of white figs will be off the charts. We have two fig trees on the property, what I believe to be the Mission (or black) fig, and the Adriatic (or white) fig, but it is only the Adriatic cultivar that has been sneaking the 'roids. We will get more white figs this year than cumulatively over the past several.

All of which leads the home cook to one obvious question: What do I do with all these figs?!