Fruit Salad: Pride of Place, Improvisation, and Play on a Plate
Plus my Fruit Salad Playbook, for Making Fresh and Preserved Fruit Salads Throughout the Year
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Before we dive in, I’m so excited to announce my new pickling spice blend with my friends at Burlap and Barrel! I hand-selected and fermented the peppers, and created a blend using their single-origin spices that can be used for pickles but is versatile enough to be used for just about any savory dish and even for a spicy mulled wine (really!)
It just launched yesterday, so if you’re looking for a way to spice up your summer preserves and meals, I hope you’ll give it a try!
Fruit Salad: Pride of Place, Improvisation, and Play on a Plate
I've been thinking a lot lately about pride of place: As I organize my home and cull a good deal of my belongings, I think back to my friend Narinder's encouragement to me when I started this downsizing journey, to get rid of what no longer serves me. As she said, everything that stays should have pride of place.
To me, fruit salad is an embodiment of pride of place in culinary form: A true appreciation and showcase of summer's bounty, a symphony of everything beautiful about local produce.
Fruit salads can be visually striking: a bowl of jewel-toned berries makes me feel like a queen, both for their beauty but also for the abundance of having such a wealth of food at my fingertips, ready to be enjoyed and shared.
It's a carnival all my senses are eager to attend each summer, bursting through the gates to experience the luscious bite of fresh strawberries or the lingering juiciness of a peach.
That carnival gets even more fun once I incorporate my fruit salad playbook (see below): The result of years of playing around in the kitchen, until that play solidified into some solid methods for highlighting the flavors of fruits in my fruit salad and making them sing, rather than masking them behind heavy dressings or too many other ingredients.