Pluot Summer Salad

A lot of the fruit salads this time of year are sweet. Juicy, ripe fragrant fruit with a sweet dressing - summer bliss bite after bite. These compositions live in the dessert category of my brain. That said, there are often times I feel compelled to snap fruit salads out of dessert-land and lead them over to the savory side of the spectrum. One of the more popular examples of this is watermelon, feta, and mint. You probably know the combination well. Sweetness from the melon, salty from the feta, tingly herbaceous from the mint. That's one example, but there are other realms to explore, and many ways to play off the soft sweetness of summer fruit. I thought we might work through some other ideas. Summer fruits are often tender, so bringing crunch and texture to a preparation can be good. Or, the introduction of a medley of green notes with herbs, sprouts, or salad greens. Also, I think we can agree, few things aren't improved by introducing deeply caramelized shallots - this works particularly well in this realm. To inspire, here's an example of what I'm talking about using pluots as the lead fruit. The fruit is set off with toasted ginger, garlic, and shallots. It is drizzled with a simple lime soy sauce dressing, and is generously flecked with herbs - in this case, mint, basil, and cilantro. Also, lots of toasted peanuts.

A couple of notes. I do make an effort to source (what I consider to be) good ginger. I can often find organic Hawaiian ginger, and tend to stock up on that. I don't buy ginger from China, and much of the ginger you encounter, organic or not, is sourced there (at least the ginger you encounter on the west coast of CA).

I deploy a soy sauce/shoyu dressing here, and love it, but I like good soy sauce. That said, if you tend to like the fruit flavor to come through more directly, you can use salt in it's place. Just add the honey to the lime juice, as called for, then whisk in sea salt, until the dressing tastes balanced and delicious to you.

Continue reading Pluot Summer Salad...

101 Cookbooks http://ift.tt/XhY7l6