Do these cornmeal lemon blackberry jam thumbprint cookies make me look fat?

A punchy ending to a fun weekend at our mountain cabin. Our friends left after breakfast and, well, a tin of cookies was left sitting out on the porch.

I actually think the cookies look better on my husband, Wayne.

And I guarantee they'll look even better on you. So in a minute, I'll share the recipe.
After breakfast.

The cabin, built on the side of the mountain in the 1880's sits on 65 acres that are so steep you have to pull yourself up by tree roots. No lights, no indoor plumbing, and no modern appliances = breakfast cooked on the cookstove.

Served on the porch. My wood-fire grilled giant marconi peppers stuffed with local sausage pencil cobb cheese grits, and our friend Jen's crusty bread.
And now that we've eaten breakfast, let's play with our cornmeal cookies ...
Corn showed up in just about all baked Appalachian heritage foods as wheat was scarce and corn was grown in patches straight up these mountains.

These fragrant cookies are crunchy, not too sweet and perfect with a cup of afternoon tea. I highly recommend that you make your own fabulous blackberry jam next summer to fill the cookies! Raspberry also goes well with these.

Appalachian Log Cabin Cornmeal Lemon Blackberry Jam Thumbprint Cookies

3/4 cup unsalted butter, softened
3/4 cup sugar
1 egg
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup coarse yellow cornmeal
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
Grated zest of one lemon
Cream butter and sugar; add egg, vanilla, lemon zest. Combine dry ingredients and then add to butter mixture and blend well. Form into two skinny logs, wrap and refrigerate or freeze until firm. To bake, slice about 1/2 inch thick and place on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet. When softened a bit, make a dent in each cookie with your finger or a wooden spoon handle, and fill with a LITTLE dab of blackberry jam. (Your baked cookies will be prettier if you put your jam in a baggie, cut the tip off, then pipe jam into cookie hole.) Bake at 350º for 10 minutes until edges are lightly browned.

Emergency Miracle Fig Ripening Trick

Here's what your September figs ought to look like. This is a Celeste fig. I've had the tree for 10 years and it's just now producing yummy figs. But, if your fig tree is full of little green knobby figs that will surely succumb to frost before ripening, I have a surprise for you. You can hasten the ripening of your little darlings with a nifty trick I learned a few years ago from my friend, Andrew, at a Men's Garden Club of Asheville plant sale. Well, I'll just show you.

Here's my Brown Turkey Fig tree that literally froze to the ground last winter, so the onset of this year's figs has been mighty slow. There are a gazillion figs on it that look like this:

OK, so here's what you do.


Pour a little dab of olive oil in a small dish.

Then, dab a tiny bit on the end of each fig. In 5 days, your green knobby fig will look like this:

The process is called oleification, discovered several centuries BC, probably by a Mediterranean fig farmer who was merrily quaffing his Tuscan red wine and sloppily dipping his bread into olive oil while sitting in his fig tree. Five days later, he had ripe figs to eat with his cheese panino. Anyway, the olive oil does something to the scientific guts of the fig, hastening ripening by about 3 weeks! The figs aren't as good when rushed, of course, but much better than a poke in the face. And, you can control the flow of your ripe figs so they don't swamp you all at once.

This happy fig has a slice of Roberta's fantastic cow's milk "Terroir" cheese in his mouth.