Baked feta salad

Being from Kent, I didn’t grow up eating fresh figs regularly. It wasn’t until moving to north-east London, surrounded by Turkish-run grocery shops, that my love for them blossomed. Trips to the greengrocer in Stoke Newington became a summer ritual, and I foraged fig leaves from a giant tree by the side of the canal in Hackney to use in cooking, inspired by the chefs at Rochelle Canteen and Claire Ptak’s Violet bakery in Hackney, east London. One food writer whose cultural connections to the fruit run much deeper than my own is Yasmin Khan. In her brilliant book, Ripe Figs, she celebrates eastern Mediterranean cuisine, paying particular homage to the culinary influence of recent refugee communities across the region. Figs, she says, “remind me of my childhood, of my home, of my community, of being loved”.

When we finally moved in six months later, I rushed out into the garden to find that the fig tree had been brutally pruned back to a bare stump. Perhaps the owners were doing us a favour and this is what you do to promote a healthy future harvest, or perhaps they just got so frustrated with our protracted purchase that they took it out on the poor tree. Either way, I’m determined that high summer will not be fig-less. Even if they’re not homegrown, I’ll be using them to make this salad with baked feta, which is one of my favourite ways to use them. The fig leaves, which have finally started growing back, lend a certain extra figgy note to the feta, which I love. There’s still no sign of the hedgehog, though.