Celery and Radish Salad with Fig Vinaigrette
Crunchy AF and perfect for RN
This time of year, when local produce in the Northeast is non-existent, I look for excitement in the produce aisle of my supermarket (sad, I know). I did clip enough parsley from one of my herb pots the other night to garnish a dish ... the recent warm winter weather has my plants rather confused. But I digress.
There are lots of things to cook with right now that are in season somewhere — mostly California. Celery, which you most likely already have in your crisper for winter soups and stews, makes a fine salad ingredient. Not just as a garnish for your lettuce-based salad either, but as the star of the show. When celery is fresh and green and crisp, it can’t be beat for its bracing freshness, not to mention its sheer crunchiness.
Fresh black mission figs are also in season right now — in this case, from Mexico. I have been seeing them everywhere lately, which is what inspired me to work them into this salad. The slightly sweet and fruity fig vinaigrette is the perfect foil for the slight bitterness from the celery and radish. The dressing is inspired by a French “gastrique,” which is essentially a sweet and sour sauce, similar to an Italian “agrodolce.” Those sauces tend to be sweeter than this one, and use more sugar. The vinaigrette has just 1 tablespoon of honey, and the rest of the sweetness — which is well balanced by the vinegar — comes from the fruit.
This is the kind of salad that works great as a side dish, with whatever you happen to be serving for dinner. I served it the other night with a version of my friend Sue Li’s popular recipe (free gift link, you’re welcome!) for Lemony Shrimp and White Bean Stew on NYT Cooking. I made it using frozen shrimp and frozen cranberry beans (frozen by me!), and reduced the amount of butter to make it a bit healthier. We ate the salad on separate plates because it was a bowl meal — slightly awkward, but it was a really good dinner. I have to admit that the two of us polished off the entire salad because it was so addictive. It can typically feed up to four people as a side though.
This is a dish that gets better as it sits. I recommend dressing it and chilling it about an hour before serving to let the celery absorb the flavors a bit. Or just know that the leftovers will be delicious eaten straight from the container.
I always stash watermelon radishes in the fall so I have them throughout the winter when I want that exciting pop of color — they last for months! (Click here for a deep dive on how to prep, cut, and store radishes, if you’d like to do the same next year.) But any radish will work for this recipe. My supermarket randomly always has black radishes, which are about the size of a baseball and look quite chic when sliced thin with their snow-white interiors and black skin.
I’m curious — what produce are you cooking with right now to brighten up these final few weeks of winter?
Tips and Subs:
To revive limp celery, cut the tops and bottoms off the celery and stand it up in a glass of water in the fridge until completely crisp.
To do this faster, slice the celery as directed above and place it in a bowl of ice water until crisp. Drain well and pat dry before proceeding.
Here is the time to use your “good” balsamic vinegar. This is the one I order.
If you don’t have sherry vinegar, use what you have. Red wine vinegar works too.
If you don’t have smokehouse almonds, use regular toasted almonds.
Even though I am a big proponent of the mandoline, which I recommend using to slice the radishes, I don’t use it for celery, because the strings tend to get caught in the blade. Just slice it thinly (but not paper-thin) by hand.
Shave the Parmesan cheese thinly using the mandoline or a vegetable peeler.
Celery and Radish Salad with Fig Vinaigrette
Serves 2 to 4