Pumpkin, Summer Vegetable and Fig Salad with Lacto-Plum Dressing

The plum vinegar that came out of the salted, lacto-fermented plums I wrote about earlier turned out to be excellent, and it earned its keep in dressings all summer.

Lacto-Fermented Plums

Here is a dressing made with that lacto plum. The clean acidity suits a salad of summer vegetables and fruit particularly well.

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Lacto plum dressing

Ingredients:

• Lacto plum vinegar 2 tbsp
• Lacto plums (the dried fruit)1/4
• Yoghurt, 1 tbsp
• Olive oil, 1 tbsp
• Sugar2/3 tsp
• Salt, 1/3
• Peppera pinch

1. Put the lacto plum vinegar in a bowl and dissolve the measured salt and sugar into it.

2. Chop the lacto plum fruit finely, working it well with the knife, then add it to the bowl with the pepper and stir.

3. Add the olive oil and stir well to emulsify.

4. Add the yoghurt and stir well.

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Pumpkin, summer vegetable and fig salad

Ingredients:

• Pumpkin
• Lotus root
• Asparagus
• Okra
• Tomato
• Fig

Cut up the seasonal vegetables and fruit and pour the dressing over. That is genuinely all there is to it, and it is very good.

Cut everything into pieces you can eat comfortably, then steam them in order of firmness, adding the softer things — tomato, fig — at the end.

Dress it with the lacto plum dressing and you have a very good salad.

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In Kyushu the good pumpkins are starting to appear, which is how you feel the end of summer here. Dressing those end-of-summer vegetables with something made from plums makes for a genuinely rich plate.