Good morning. When you come across a fruit salad in the wild, it’s usually junk: unripe chunks of melon mixed with cardboard honeydew, pale half strawberries, slippery rounds of browned banana, stringy chunks of pineapple, gritty blueberries, the occasional soft grape. It’s depressing.
But if you make your own fruit salad? When you can buy and use a nice mix of ripe fruit, and then enhance the flavors with acidity and sugar? That’s an antidepressant situation, an experiment that can never go wrong. It’s a breakfast delight, an afternoon delight, a supper dessert to exult.
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Fruit Salad
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Use Ali Slagle’s new recipe (above) to start your explorations. She massages lime zest into a bit of sugar to release the oils, then mixes it into the fruit with lime juice, adjusting the ratio of juice to sugar until the result is electric. You could add some chopped mint, some red pepper flakes. Some like ground cinnamon or coriander. A little basil? That’s very good food.
As for the rest of the week. …
Monday
I like Hetty McKinnon’s cold noodle salad with spicy peanut sauce for its weeknight versatility. She calls for cucumbers, peppers, and radishes, but you can also make it with cabbage or carrots, or with asparagus, broccoli, or cauliflower—whatever is in the vegetable drawer and looks good. Mix those into soba noodles and drizzle the amazing sauce on top, making the dish umami rich and fiery.
Tuesday
Amandeep Sharma’s butter chicken recipe was a staple of staff meals at Attica restaurant, in Melbourne, Australia, where I learned to make the dish. It’s excellent.
Wednesday
David Tanis’ delicious recipe for a spinach and tofu salad is a summer delight, and those who don’t want to turn on their oven can certainly sear the tofu in a skillet. Note, however, that there is brown sugar in the marinade.
Thursday
It doesn’t take long to make your own ranch dressing, as Ali does in her pan-seared ranch chicken recipe, using it as both a marinade and a creamy, herbaceous sauce. (I’m impressed with the subscriber who told us he made bacon for the chicken, seared the chicken in its fat, then crumbled the pieces over the sauce.) Bring it on.
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Now it’s miles away from the subjects of braising rabbit and assembling salad, but I enjoyed Zadie Smith’s latest piece for The New Yorker about writing historical fiction in the shadow of Charles Dickens.
There’s something downright honest about The Financial Times’ commitment to over-the-top luxury reporting in How to Spend It, the newspaper’s weekend magazine. So yeah, let’s see what it’s like for Rory FH Smith behind the wheel of an all-electric Rolls-Royce Spectre: “On Napa’s wooded and winding roads, Specter’s acceleration is stately, not excruciatingly sharp like so many electric cars. “
Alexandra Jacobs writes book reviews for DailyExpertNews with such enthusiasm and excitement that I could read Andrew Lipstein’s “The Vegan” at her suggestion.
Finally, the pioneering Jamaican singer Desmond Dekker was born on this day in 1944. (He passed away in 2006 and Jon Pareles wrote his obituary for The Times.) Cue “The Israelites,” live in 2004. Listen to it while you cut fruit. I’ll be back next week.