Cook and be merry: Fig Salad with Walnuts and Mint
Lynne Hemer is a Manhattan Beach chef. For printable copies of her recipes visit www.cookandbemerry.com Good to Grill California figs are harvested in the late summer and early fall, and I found them at every farmers market I visited in the last month. These that I found at the Torrance Farmers Market were so beautiful, I wanted to eat them fresh, so I created this salad with walnuts, mint and lemon vinaigrette, which complement their subtle sweetness and soft texture. The fig tree’s fruit is technically a syconium, an enlarged, fleshy, hollow receptacle with multiple fruitlets on the inside surface. The flower is not visible, as it blooms inside the fruit. The small orifice (ostiole) visible on the end of the fruit is a narrow passage which allows a specialized wasp, the fig wasp, to enter the fruit and pollinate the flower, after which the fruit grows seeds inside. The common fig probably originated in southern Arabia. Ancient records show the Sumerians (2900 B.C.) and Assyrians (2000 B.C.) were familiar with it. It slowly spread from there to Syria and the Mediterranean coast by seafaring Phoenicians and Greeks. Figs supposedly reached China in 127 A.D. and Cuba in 1526. Figs…
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