"Sheer Ecstasy In A Fruit . . ."

On The Highway To Korça

While on one of David's work trips, we pulled off the highway to buy just-off-the-tree figs.

Figs may be green or dark brown

David's colleague Xhoana picking out perfectly ripe figs for our road trip.

Davidi eating figs from the bag. . . unable to wait.

After reading about Mimi Sheraton's experience eating figs in her article "10 Epiphanies" in the June 2013 Smithsonian Magazine, we had to share, as her encounter with an Adriatic fig provided words for our new found love:  

Until early one September morning long ago, the only figs I knew -- and liked a lot -- were dried:  golden-brown, sticky and chewy with a burnished sweetness spiked with the intriguing crackle of tiny pinpoint seeds. But on the fateful morning in the Marche town of Senigallia beside the Adriatic, I tasted a small, plump jade green fig plucked from a tree in a garden.  Sparkling with dew, the sun-warmed, suede-like skin yielded to a night-chilled, honeyed center -- sheer ecstasy in a fruit that bore little resemblance to the dried version.  I have had many delectable fresh green figs since but none that compared with the original, whether eaten out-of-hand, or split open on a plate and dabbed with a swirl of crème frâiche or a rivulet of heavy sweet cream.