Fig Blue Cheese Walnut Salad with Warm Bacon Dressing

Independence Day weekend in Boston, which is a whole production. The Esplanade fills up before noon with people claiming their spots for the evening concert and fireworks, and the city has a specific holiday energy that is equal parts celebration and chaos, and Sean D. and I took the T to the waterfront at seven in the morning with a blanket and a cooler and found a spot and defended it for approximately eleven hours, which sounds exhausting and was, and was also one of the best days we've had since the wedding.

Maureen packed us a cooler. This is one of Maureen's primary love languages: providing food for an event before you could possibly have asked her to. The cooler contained corned beef sandwiches on soda bread, a container of potato salad, apple slices with cheddar, a bag of her oatmeal cookies, and two bottles of water with a note attached that said "drink the water." The corned beef sandwiches were eaten by ten AM. There is no such thing as too early for corned beef in this family.

Sean D. is teaching summer school, which at Boston Latin means a condensed AP prep course for rising juniors, and he talks about it with the kind of enthusiasm that is either inspiring or exhausting depending on the time of day. I find it inspiring, mostly, because it is one of the things I fell in love with — his absolute certainty that what he is doing matters, his complete inability to mail it in, his genuine investment in whether a sixteen-year-old from Dorchester understands the Missouri Compromise. He cares about this. I love him for caring about it. I also sometimes have to remind him that I am also in the room and not a rising junior.

I made a Fourth of July potato salad from scratch to bring to Patrick's cookout Sunday — a variation on Maureen's recipe, with a little Dijon mustard and apple cider vinegar instead of just the yellow mustard. It was good. Maureen tasted it and said, "That's different." I said, "Better or worse?" Long pause. "It's an evolution," she said. In Maureen-food-criticism, "evolution" is the highest available compliment that acknowledges the original while accepting the change. I'll take it.

The potato salad I brought to Patrick’s cookout that Sunday got me thinking about what it means to take a beloved recipe and make it your own — to honor where it came from while still putting something of yourself into it. This fig, blue cheese, and walnut salad with warm bacon dressing is another dish in that spirit: a composed salad that feels elevated without being fussy, the kind of thing you bring to a summer table and watch disappear. It’s got that same mix of sweet and tangy and rich that I was going for with the Dijon potato salad, just dressed up for company. Maureen would probably call it an evolution too.

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 10 minutes | Total Time: 25 minutes | Servings: 4

Ingredients

6 cups mixed greens or arugula
8 fresh or dried figs, halved (or quartered if large)
1/2 cup crumbled blue cheese
1/2 cup walnut halves, toasted
1/4 red onion, very thinly sliced
4 strips thick-cut bacon, cut into lardons
3 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon honey
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Pinch of kosher salt

Instructions

Toast the walnuts. In a dry skillet over medium heat, toast the walnut halves for 3 to 4 minutes, stirring frequently, until fragrant and lightly golden. Transfer to a plate and set aside.
Cook the bacon. In the same skillet over medium heat, cook the bacon lardons until crisp and the fat has rendered, about 6 to 8 minutes. Use a slotted spoon to transfer the bacon to a paper towel—lined plate, leaving the drippings in the pan. Remove the pan from heat.
Make the warm dressing. With the skillet off heat, whisk the apple cider vinegar, Dijon mustard, honey, salt, and pepper directly into the warm bacon drippings until emulsified. Taste and adjust seasoning as needed.
Build the salad. Arrange the greens on a large platter or in a wide salad bowl. Scatter the figs, red onion, toasted walnuts, crumbled blue cheese, and crispy bacon over the top.
Dress and serve. Drizzle the warm bacon dressing over the salad just before serving. Toss gently or serve family-style and let guests toss their own portions. Serve immediately while the dressing is still warm.

Nutrition (per serving)

Fig Blue Cheese Walnut Salad with Warm Bacon Dressing — The Cookout Dish That Earned an “Evolution”