Heat Wave

It’s hot in Los Angeles right now. Damn hot.

It’s the kind of heat that sinks into the walls and floorboards of our old apartment, turning our sweet home into some kind of ceremonial sweat lodge and its inhabitants into unwitting narcoleptics.

Lately, if we’re not asleep, complaining about the heat, or shouting over the noise of our rink-a-dink fan, we are probably in intense negotiations about what we’re going to eat. Clearly, in these dire circumstances, the last thing a sane person would want to do is use the oven. Even looking at the darn thing makes the leather on our club chair start to chafe.

Except, I’ve never been so good about boundaries. Tell me the object of the game is not to step on the cracks on the sidewalk and suddenly all I can think about is all those tiny cracks. Likewise, raise the temperature of my apartment to a balmy 110 degrees and all I can think about is baking.

John let the chocolate chip banana bread slide. After all, it’s his favorite. But then he laid down the law. No more using the oven. Period.

So, we spent the next several days eating elaborate salads, pasta dishes, and strange concoctions made out of the remnants of our fridge. I grew anxious to rebel. John must have been onto me because the moment I stepped foot in the kitchen he’d appear out of nowhere, asking, “Whatcha cooking?”

One Sunday night, my friend Celia and I planned to cook dinner together. I pitched her all sorts of elaborate menu ideas involving scallop rolls and strawberry-rhubarb pie.

“Naw, it’s too hot. Let’s just do something simple, like a salad.”

We met at Whole Foods and tossed assorted odds and ends into our cart, confident it would all add up to something worthy. Then we came across fresh black mission figs that looked ripe and plump, too good to pass up. We weighed our options of putting them in a salad or serving them with crème fraîche for dessert, when Celia suggested we stuff the figs with a strong blue cheese, wrap the whole thing in prosciutto, and roast it.

If you’ve never tasted the holy trinity of prosciutto, figs, and blue cheese you are doing yourself a serious disservice. The salty, richness of the meat is offset by the sweet, honey flavor of the figs, with the assertive blue cheese snapping the palate to attention. It’s an absolute magic trick in your mouth.

True, using the oven was risky. But so was subsisting off hush puppies and barbeque for two years in North Carolina, and we survived. We could handle this.

That night we ate a butter lettuce salad with potatoes, green beans and radishes and fresh cheese bread (after all, the oven was already on). But the meal started and ended with us popping those prosciutto wrapped figs like candy into our mouths.

Even when our apartment reached a shocking new height of discomfort, John didn’t complain. He just went back for seconds.

Prosciutto Wrapped Fresh Figs and Blue Cheese

Ironically, since we risked our sanity to make these, I’ve stumbled across several recipes that call for skewering fresh figs and cooking them on the grill. So, if you’re kitchen feels like a sauna even before you start cooking, consider using a backyard bbq or a grill pan to make this hors d’oeuvre.

I prefer to keep things simple, but you can get fancy by stuffing pecans in the figs too, or drizzling it with honey.

8 Black Mission figs

½ cup blue cheese, cut into ½ inch cubes

8 thin slices proscuitto

1. Cut an X in the top of each fig and open like a flower. Fill with a small cube of blue cheese.

2. Wrap the prosciutto around each fig, overlapping the edges.

3. Roast at 375 degrees until the prosciutto is a little crispy and fig is warmed through, about 10 minutes.