Cooking (and canning) with Dr. Monkey

Today's episode, Fig Bomb Preserves!

It's fig time in Tennessee, that's right kids the figs on our tree are finally getting ripe and they're coming in faster than incumbent Democrats in Congress can sell out progressive voters. So I decided to make some fig preserves, with a twist.

I started off by picking, stemming, washing, and chopping up all the ripe figs I had. I ended up with four cups of ripe figs: And no, you don't ever want to peel figs. The whole thing, aside from the stem is edible and should be used when preserving or eating said figs.

After getting my figs ready for cooking, I put one half cup of sugar per cup of figs into my cooking pot. Then I added one quarter cup of water per cup of figs to the sugar and I cooked it up together:As soon as the sugar dissolved in the water I added half my figs and I let them cook down for about a half an hour. As the figs cooked down I stemmed and deseeded this many cherry bomb peppers:
Then I diced the peppers and I added half of them to the figs that were cooking and half to the uncooked figs. After the first half of the figs cooked, I added the other half of the figs and peppers and I let it cook for another half hour. I also added the zest and juice from two lemons to the fig pepper mixture.

As the figs cooked I sterilized my jars. And after the whole batch of figs and peppers had cooked down, I ladled them into my jars. After tightly sealing them I then placed my jars in the hot water to make sure they were sealed properly and to let them rest in the near boiling water. Once they had sat in the water bath for about a half hour I took then out and let them cool. And I ended up with five 8 oz jars of what I call Fig Bomb preserves.
They have a sweet taste to start but by the end of your bite you fell the heat of the peppers. It's not too hot and it's not too sweet, it's just right Goldilocks.