Las Gorditas & Fig Toasts

This was a day in which we explored our city from one side to the other. We started on one side of the metro, with lunch at Las Gorditas at 844 Central in Kansas City, KS. It's a spot recommended by a friend of a friend and my husband's new favorite stop for lunch. They have other items on the menu (not many), but we were there for the gorditas. (If the place is named after a particular item, it seems rather foolish to order a burrito.) You can watch the ladies making these thick corn tortillas behind the counter, and they're as delicious as they look. We ordered three - one filled with pork and potatoes, one with nopales and chile, and one with a delicious fried chile relleno. The cheese in the relleno was gooey and thick and the pork was perfectly seasoned, moist and tender. My only complaint is that I didn't start with the nopales gordita, which had too much time to sit and become dangerous to handle. It fell apart in my hands, on my table, on my shirt. The cactus, however, was delicious (and thankfully, there were napkins on my table - lots of napkins). We washed it all down with bottles of soda - Mexican Coke for him, orange soda for me. Lunch was around $12 and service, while distracted, was attentive enough. We were the only non-Spanish speakers there at lunch, which is always a good sign.

With many a stop in between, we ended our food adventure at Dean and Deluca at Town Center. Two or so times a year, we go there for nothing in particular. I quickly lose him to the samples and the cheese counter and I can just wander aimlessly, exploring the jars and bottles and boxes and candies and breads. Forget clothes and shoes and compact discs, this is my kind of shopping.

This afternoon I had figs on the brain. Blame it on my current nine-months-pregnant state if you will, but a little something we saw last night on the television made me obsessed with figs. I scoured the shelves until I found a jar of Terrabianca Caramelized Figs, grabbed a wedge of Fourme D'Ambert (a perfectly creamy and mild blue cheese) and a good baguette and got the heck out of there before I spent any more money. At home, we whipped up these delicious little things (I'm calling them fig toasts), parked our rears on the back deck with cool drinks and called it a day. Also, I did lots of bowing and patting myself on the back. These were damn good toasts. Treat yourself sometime.


Fig Toasts

a good french baguette
caramelized figs
caramelized onion
good creamy blue cheese

Crisp slices of bread in 350 degree oven for 5-6 minutes. Remove from oven and top each slice with half a caramelized fig. Spread fig out as best you can - any naked bread can be drizzled with the thick fig juices in the jar. Top with caramelized onions and crumbles of blue cheese.