Cookbook Review - A Platter of Figs

Yum! That's the jist of my experience with A Platter of Figs by David Tanis. The book itself is beautiful with amazing pictures of the food which I always find helpful when trying to determine what my final product is supposed to look like. The recipes are ordered by seasons and in menus, each focusing on the freshest ingredients. That alone would make me buy this book, but before I added to the collection (it's a large one), a group of us decided to test a few of them out.

We decided to make a total of 10 dishes between the 4 of us and we gave ourselves 3.5 hours. We luckily got it all completed, but it definitely required some team work. Everything turned out delicious. We tried to review all of the recipes at the end and here is what I could remember..

Cherry tomato crostini with ricotta - SO GOOD!!! AMAZING! Crostini will never be the same again. I enjoyed eating the leftover the next day even on soggy bread it was so good...
Spinach cake - Surprisingly light and accompanied with a tasty herb salad, which completed the dish perfectly.
Corn, squash, & beans with jalapeno butter - Really tasty.. you can never go wrong with spicy butter.
Green lasagne - Certainly a labor of love... The recipe for the noodles was a little dry, so added a lot more olive oil. I did a lot more than 4 layers too, and kept the filling to a minimum between each layer. Also only used half of the bechemel it required and didn't cook the noodles first.. Turned out delicious. This is obviously one of the one's I worked on
Shaved summer squash - You would never guess that raw squash could be so tasty, but it was good so good.. and so were the raw squash blossoms.. YUM!
Lobster risotto - Delicious.. Another labor of love between cooking the lobsters, taking out the meat, then making the broth and stirring the risotto... It did make tons of lobster broth though, which was saved for another use.. Very very good...
Roast pork loin - This was super tasty. Lots of great flavor. The only change I would make is to buy an instant read thermometer you can leave in the oven. We played it a little too safe and over did it a tad. Also, buy a pork loin with lots of fat is needed to keep it moist or wrap it in bacon.
Peaches in wine - So refreshing and light.. The peaches are not cooked so they keep their firmness.
Blackberry and blueberry crumble - Amazingly good, and I don't even like cooked fruit.. Especially with vanilla ice cream.. YUM!

So all in, I have to say that this book is definitely on the buy list. Everything we had turned out so well, the boys even did the cleaning up.

(pictures to be added soon)