Healthy Children: End Of Summer Salad With Fig Balsamic Vinaigrette

End Of Summer Salad With Fig Balsamic Vinaigrette

When I was a little girl, my family and I would take summer vacations in this small town in Baja California called San Quentin. How they ever found this little town about 5 hours south of San Diego is beyond me, but we loved it. We would fish, eat amazing lobster burritos, go to (endless) flea markets, explore local hot springs, and play pinnacle for hours.

While I have so many positive memories of these trips with my family, one of the most powerful and sweet memories I have was parking myself below the one giant fig tree near the house, in the cool shade, and eating figs. For days. The tree literally never ran out of figs, even for a little girl to reach.

I must’ve seriously eaten hundreds of them in a weekend trip.

I knew it was great then, but I had no idea I would’t ever again enjoy such fig bliss once I grew up and my parents sold their home.

Guess you really don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

Ever since that time, as you can imagine, I have had a great fondness for figs. Not fig jam, fig pizza, fig newtons, or baked figs. Fresh, raw figs in all their sweet and textured glory.

There’s just something about biting into a fresh, sweet fig that brings me back to that innocent little girl, stuffing her face with figs.

Dustin will even buy me a carton of fresh figs when they come in season during the summer as a surprise. That man.

So, as you can imagine, I enjoy summer figs a great deal, even nowadays. While most figs don’t compare to the memories of my childhood, they’ll sure do in a pinch.

Or – say – a daily summer fig salad for days because I just can’t stop with the summer figs.

That’s why I really like adding fresh figs to this end of summer salad and then blending up a couple more in the fresh fig balsamic vinaigrette because it – yep – covers the whole salad in some sort of sweet figgy goodness.

And I’m all about that figgy goodness.