Tarragon and Chives

 First ripe black figs are sliced and artfully arranged in an unbaked buttery tart shell.  They are brushed with a Meyer lemon glaze, sprinkled with Armagnac and baked in a hot oven for about 45 minutes.  I like to serve slices of fig tart with spoonfuls of crème fraîche, creating a simply luscious dessert for the fig lovers in my life.  I say, the more figs the merrier however the amount of figs and their arrangement is up to you.  Because I find it easier to roll out- my favorite tart dough is made using an egg whisked together with a teaspoon of ice water.  The tart shell doesn't need to be pre-baked and works very well with this quite saucy fig filling.  I also brush a small amount of the lemon glaze on the tart shell bottom before I arrange my fig slices, just to seal it up a bit.  Try to stick with a tablespoon of Armagnac sprinkled over the figs before baking as not to add too much additional liquid.  The abundant hot bubbling fig slices, lemon glaze and armagnac filling wil

 Our intense, way too long heatwave seems to be winding down, finally.  Here is a recipe for cold soup for dinner for our way too hot-Bay Area's September heatwave of 2022, or one in the future.  I always thought September and October were too hot, but now...the word dread comes to mind.  So, I made this cooling gazpacho one night during the worst of the heatwave, like 112F during the day and over a 100F at dinnertime.  It wouldn't surprise me if we still have another heatwave before the rainy season which used to start in midway into October, now I'm dating myself, and we had snow in the Sierra in November. I am loving the addition of plums to my soup, instead of the usual cucumbers that are chunked up and blended with the tomatoes.  The plums came from the farmers market and were innocently sitting in a bowl, minding their own business, next to the tomatoes on my counter, when the idea to add them to the tomatoes in the soup came to me.  Plums add a sweet note to the soup

 We had a bumper crop of cherry tomatoes this summer.  I was only going to buy one cherry tomato plant but ended up with four different varieties, tomato plant retail therapy-I guess.  They all produced pretty well but two were outstanding, A+.  The little yellow and red round cherry tomatoes ended up in just about everything I put on the table this summer.  The exotic bright orange and yellow pear tomatoes were good but not big producers but I'm okay with that as the other two plants picked up the slack. Yesterday I made another salad recipe featuring-guess what!  I love Greek salads and this salad has just about everything except the salty black olives but they could easily be added.  I'm really into this block feta cheese cut in slices placed over the salad, then you can kind of 'do your own thing' with the feta as you eat your way through this delicious summery green bean salad.   Greek Style Green Bean Salad Serves 4, generously 1 pound fresh green beans, ends trim