For a Day Like Today

I'm having the hardest time sitting down at the computer right now, writing this post.  You see, after all the "May Grey" and "June Gloom" and the whatever the heck you call it when July is still cool and overcast, we finally have glorious cloud free skies!  And it's hot!  It went from 67F to 80F in one quick day, and I really couldn't be happier.  I'm antsy sitting in my chair, sun streaming through the window - the cat lounging in a pool of sunlight on the ground next to me, because she might be just as happy as me about the return of sun and sunbathing - I gotta get outside and soak it up.  The beach calls to me.

But first let me give you this fruit salad.  It's cause to celebrate as well - in my opinion at least.  It's all at once sweet and tart and just the right amount of spicy from the addition of serrano chiles.  Blows my mind.  Last October we took a little family excursion and went camping in the Anza Borrego desert and my Dad brought this amazing fruit salad.  It's one of those, some of this, some more of this, a little of that kind of recipes, and it's been stuck in my head ever since.  I was just biding my time until the mango, pineapple and blueberries were all in season and ripe.  In a pinch you could use canned pineapple, but everything else should be fresh.  So working from my visual memory I recreated the salad and even managed to write down the proportions for you, dear reader.

I've seen similar recipes out there but they were more salsa oriented with the inclusion of cilantro and maybe even some olive oil.  Meh.  I like this one better.  And don't turn your nose up at the use of onion with fruit - I know the words onion and fruit salad don't seem to go together, but trust me, they do here.  For one, it's a sweet onion.  For another, you rinse the cut up onion before adding it to the fruit so whatever bite the onion had it's much less now.  You of course could use this as a salsa and spoon it over grilled fish or even atop some plain nachos (just tortilla chips with some melted jack cheese), but this salad doesn't last long around here and I'm yet to try either of those myself.  The salad gets made then promptly gobbled.  Straight from the bowl.  With a fork.

The beach, this salad...happiness.


Spicy Mango Pineapple Salad (or Salsa)

If you want to use this more as a salsa, you can cut the pineapple into smaller chunks so everything is more uniformly sized.  As far as the serrano in this recipe is concerned, I actually used a whole one, but depending on your heat/spice preferences you may want to start with just 1/2.  I usually test the heat of the chile by touching my tongue to it lightly after cutting the stem off and make my judgment from there.  This one seemed unusually tame so I threw the whole thing in there, but once I mixed everything up it was surprisingly spicy, thus I'd say, start with half and taste once it's all mixed up.

4 servings

1 mango, about 1 cup, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
1 cup pineapple, cut into 1 inch chunks
1/2 cup blueberries
1/4 cup sweet onion, diced and rinsed in cold water
1/2 serrano chile, finely minced
1/2 lime, juiced

Combine the mango, pineapple, blueberries, sweet onion and serrano in a bowl.  Squeeze the lime juice over and mix it up.