The Yum Yum Factor

I love spicy jams and jellies with cheese and I also have been cooking with these spicy jams lately. I have a pepper blast berry jelly that is really quite hot and it's great with roast meats. The PC Bacon Marmalade is is thing of beauty and I feel sorry for all of you Americans who can't get your greasy paws on this stuff but it's a fair exchange for rotel, I guess. The high sugar content in jam means it really caramelizes nicely and it gives a nice, sticky, sweet glaze to a roast pork tenderloin or some chicken thighs. I throw in some chicken stock with some of the jam and make a delicious pan sauce and we are good to go. The magical asian produce store had a huge stack of fresh figs that were too cheap to pass up on so the only choice I had was to make a small batch of fig jam. Since I already know that I am only going to use it for dishes like this pork tenderloin with fig jam or with cheese, I decided to just throw some hot sauce right into the jam ...

I love fig jam so much. I love it with cheese and I love it straight off the spoon but I really love to cook with it. The high sugar content means lots of yummy caramelization and that makes it a wonderful thing to baste roasted meats with. I kept seeing this recipe everywhere. I sweat to god, if you google pork tenderloin fig jam, this comes up on a bazillion web sites so I figured it must be pretty good. Since it was also Halloween, I made colcannon to go with it and although it might not be the first side dish that comes to mind when making a spicy figgy bit of pork, it was actually quite delicious together and was happily gobbled up and gave some nice, starchy substance to line the tummy in preparation for a candy assault after dinner. Just because I can, this was what left my house after polishing off a big plate of pork and colcannon. I don't know you, but I like to keep my evil demon necromancers happy. He looks pretty cheery, no? I used less hot sauce than the...