Blue Cheese Spread with Fig Preserves

When you start canning stuff, you also start looking for ways to use them up!  A few years ago, I started canning figs.  Fortunately, when I expressed interest to my mother and mother-in-law, they both became a great source for fresh figs.

One year, my mother’s friend had a bumper crop of figs.  They had run out of room to store them in, and also run out of people who wanted them.

Lucky me.

My mom brought them to father-in-law’s, who placed them single layer on cookie sheets and then placed them in the freezer.  The next weekend, I went over there and transferred all the figs to ziploc bags, placed them in an ice chest, and returned home with about 7 fully stuffed gallon bags of  individually frozen figs.  Each bag weighed right at 4 pounds, a good weight for making small batches of fig preserves.

Here is one great way to use up an 8- or 16-ounce jar of whole fig preserves or fig jam.

To make the Blue Cheese Spread, you will need:

• 8 ounces of cream cheese, at room temperature

• 1 tablespoon finely minced white or red onion

• 4 to 6 ounces blue cheese, crumbled

Mix all ingredients on low for a few minutes.  Line a 12 ounce or 2 8-ounce bowls with plastic wrap.  Gently press  the cheese mixture into the bowl, pressing firmly with a spoon or spatula.  Pull the plastic wrap together to seal  the top.  Refrigerate at least a few hours to let harden, preferably overnight.

To prepare the figs, I removed the stems and quartered them.  These are the small Southern figs, so they could actually be served whole, but it’d be a little awkward.

Unwrap the cheese round and place in the center or your platter or serving dish.  Arrange the fig pieces, with syrup if you have any, on half the plate.  Pecans also go really well with this also, either plain, toasted, or pralined.

Since I didn’t have any syrup to make the crackers soggy, I arranged the crackers on the platter also.  The crackers or bread slices could be placed in a separate dish.

Yummy!