Salad of Black Mission Figs with Roasted Sweet Peppers and Shaved Fennel

I love the licorice flavor in plants such as fennel and tarragon. For this salad, we make a fennel oil from the fronds, and we garnish it with the wild fennel buds. In summer, I’ll find a fennel patch alongside the road, where the buds are still green and haven’t blossomed, and I’ll cut all the tops off. We’ll pick out the buds and blanch them. They’re explosive. This salad is really about the Napa Valley, where we have the same problem of overabundance of figs as most people do with tomato