OPB’s “Superabundant” explores the stories behind the foods of the Pacific Northwest with videos, articles and this weekly newsletter. Every week, Heather Arndt Anderson, a Portland-based culinary historian, food writer and ecologist, highlights different aspects of the region’s food ecosystem. This week she offers a recipe for a spicy and sticky-sweet fig-chile jam rivaling anything you’d find in a gourmet grocery store.

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If the birds offer any clue, this is a very, very busy time of year. Every seed tumbling from shriveled flower heads must be pecked up (or in the case of sunflowers, directly helped from their tight disks). Goldfinches and juncos enjoy the seeds with a side salad, pecking leaves apart as they graze through the sunflowers and mullein. The huckleberries and elderberries, plums and figs must all be sampled too, but I don’t mind sharing with cedar waxwings and downy woodpeckers. Especially when it comes to the figs — there’s always more than enough to go around. Once I get tired of drying them and turning them into preserves, I’ll probably start shoving them into a jar of Cognac for winter sipping. Luckily, eating my homegrown Brown Turkey figs doesn’t require exploring entomophagy, but some types of figs are technically not vegan — do you know why not? Read on to find out!

Watch the Strawberries episode of “Superabundant”

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Note from Heather: One of the goodies in the gift basket will be from my own garden!

Puttin’ up

Various preservation methods have existed for millennia as a way to extend the shelf life of seasonal, perishable foods and make them more nutritious, but smoking, jamming, fermenting and pickling are also handy ways to make humble ingredients taste incredible. This week’s episode of OPB’s “The Evergreen” podcast, in which “Superabundant” narrator Crystal Ligori spends some time in the ōkta kitchen and I make blackberry jam with podcast hosts Jenn Chávez and Julie Sabatier, explores how some folks are making the most of Oregon’s bounty.

Clouds no longer in the forecast

Uncanny timing: On Monday, ōkta wasn’t just featured on “The Evergreen” podcast, but the hyperlocal, microseasonal restaurant abruptly announced closure on an Instagram post the same day. (The restaurant’s name refers to a unit of measurement of cloud cover, used in meteorology.)

Ham on rye, hold the mustard gas

Joining the ranks of photographers and writers, food bloggers and recipe developers are the latest group of creative workers to feel the pressure of AI mounting, as culinary content is increasingly produced with a prompt instead of professional experience. On a good day, AI can speed up some tasks or even drive innovation, but unlike an AI-generated photo where the subject has wonky hands or a literary character utters nonsensical dialog, if AI gets a recipe wrong, it could actually kill somebody. NPR’s Charlotte Engrav talked about it with a few content creators to get some perspective.

Last but not yeast, bread news

Breadheads, mark your calendars! Bread Fest is returning to Portland’s Central Eastside on Sunday, Oct. 20, at the Factor Building on Southeast 3rd and Madison (10 a.m.- 2 p.m., $5 at the door). And wheat-free breadheads, you can also rejoice! Kirari West (one of California’s best-loved gluten-free bakery/cafes) is opening a Portland location on Northwest 23rd this fall.

It’s the shoulder season, as it’s known in some parts — that ultra-productive time of year when the best of the summer produce (tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, zucchini, cucumbers, melons) is still very much present as the cooler-weather crops like apples, pears, pumpkins and wild mushrooms make their entrance. My own garden is a testament to this, as another tiny Jack-Be-Little pumpkin seems to ripen every day and the Red Russian kale is as ruffly as a flamenco dancer’s dress, all while the Cheongyang peppers and golden tomatillos continue drinking up every photon of warm sunlight.

It still feels early for pears in markets (they’re never as ripe as I want them, and just don’t taste as good ripened in a paper bag) but the fruit from neighborhood trees is soft, fragrant and, unfortunately, all over the ground. My apple trees have hardly produced this year, but next month I can always stock up on other locally grown specimens.

Lately, in the ‘Superabundant’ kitchen

✨ After having a rather disappointing interpretation of Japanese curry (at a nice restaurant that I will not name), I hankered for something hewing closer to the real thing, so I made katsu curry from scratch to eat with rice, soft boiled backyard eggs and a julienne of unripe persimmons from my trees, which I pickled to taste like benishoga using ginger, homemade momosu (the brine from making peach momoboshi back in June) and red shiso from the garden. (I guess technically it should be called benikaki?).

✨ A backlog of eggs and some leftover banh mi rolls demanded a brinner (breakfast for dinner) night; I made ham, egg and cheese sandwiches with sautéed peppers and thick slices of tomato and a side of tater tots (basically hash browns, right?).

✨ Cooler nights (and the temptation of my blooming Brugmansia, which hits peak fragrance at dusk) has led me to occasional backyard fire pit use, but when it’s time for me to retire I always feel guilty about wasting the heat of the glowing coals. I laid a few eggs in the coals to roast one night to try making Sephardic Jewish huevos haminados (why not? If they fail, I can always feed them back to my hens). The coals must’ve cooled down too quickly because they didn’t take on the nutty brown color or creamy texture, but they were still good as an egg salad with mayo and chopped pickles.

Recipe: Fig-chile jam

At my house, we are vastly outpaced by the fig tree. Even with the jays, squirrels, wasps and ants teaming up to do their bit, I’m still processing and giving away pounds and pounds of fruit every week — and that’s after pruning off more than half the tree back in June!

None of it ever goes to waste — even the fruit that hits the ground is scooped up for the backyard hens or swept under a shrub for some other fauna, be it mega or micro. Whatever can’t be turned to jam (or eggs) will become soil for growing something else, but I try to intercept before that happens, because autumn is the time for saving.

Even if we no longer rely on home food preservation as a matter of survival, collecting the seeds, nuts and fruits of fall is an important act of observing the seasonal transition. And it’s not just food security that we’re banking — providing for our future pleasure is an act of self-care.

This time of year always reminds me of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” but contrary to the moral of Aesop’s fable, I don’t think productivity has to be at odds with a little hedonism. It would seem that fall’s fruits are in agreement about that too (see also: pomegranate’s cheeky reputation). I mean, is there any more obvious symbol of the voluptuary than the fig? At the time of year when everyone else is breaking out the fuzzy socks and pumpkin spice lattes, here comes this icon of fecundity, at her absolute peak, a living shrine of fertility.

How fertile is my fig tree? Well let’s just say it doesn’t even need pollination help from fig wasps — like most of the figs that humans eat, my Brown Turkey, an Adriatic-type fig, is self-fertile (the technical term is parthenocarpic, which means “virgin fruit”).* I guess it makes sense that I have so goshdarn many of them.

Anyway, in this week’s installment of “Please, For the Love of All That is Good, Disburden Me of This Superabundance,” a recipe that is easily scaled up depending on how buried you are in figs — put it up in small jelly jars and give it away as holiday gifts, or hoard it all yourself and always be ready for a bangin’ cheese plate.

*By contrast, the Smyrna-type figs require a tiny fig wasp to crawl inside the fig’s ostiole, dragging pollen along with her. After the female lays her eggs, she heroically digs an escape tunnel for her mate and then becomes a martyr inside the fruit (thus rendering the fig non-vegan).

Makes 5 half-pint (8-ounce) jars of jam

Ingredients

3 pounds ripe figs, any variety

2 tablespoons dried red chile flake

2 ½ cups sugar

1 tablespoon lemon juice or ¼ teaspoon citric acid

2 tablespoons pectin (optional)

Instructions

1. In a medium-sized, heavy-bottomed pot, heat the figs over medium heat until they begin to release some liquid. Mash them up a bit with your spoon, add the chile flake and bring the pot to a simmer. Cook the figs, stirring occasionally, until they’ve broken down into a pulp, about an hour or so.
2. Mash the figs up with your spoon as much or as little as you like. If you have an immersion blender, you can use it here to make the jam a little more smooth, but it’s nice to leave some jammy fruit bits in the mix.
3. Have five clean, sterilized half-pint jars ready and if you’re planning to can your jam, bring your water bath to a boil — if you don’t have a special canner, use a large stock pot with a clean washcloth laid in the bottom (it helps keep the jars from rattling around).
4. Add the sugar and lemon juice or citric acid and bring to a rolling boil (“a boil that can’t be stirred down” is what your granny or the instructions on a box of pectin might say, which is beautifully evocative). If you prefer a more spreadable texture to the jam, whisk in the pectin here and let it boil for 1 minute. If you like a jam that’s more spoonable, skip the pectin.
5. Ladle the jam into the prepared jars, run a chopstick through the jam to release any air bubbles, then wipe the rims with a clean, damp cloth and affix the lids and bands. If you’re canning the jam, lower the jars into your boiling water bath to process for 5 minutes, then remove the jars to cool overnight. Check the seals the next day and store any jars that didn’t seal in the refrigerator.

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