Fig and Rocket Salad

I love this combination—the honey-sweet figs with peppery greens, the mild cheese and the acid surprise of vinegar. Figs have two brief moments, one in June and another in the fall. In the fall you might include a few of the new crop of milky-fleshed walnuts tucked among the greens.

Ripe figs don’t travel, so in some ways this is a regional kind of salad. For me it evokes the feeling of the Central Valley of California, which is home—the heavy summer heat that brings on the figs, th