Frivolous Fruit

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I just love grapefruit, strawberry and raspberry, and as it is the season now for good deals my recipe of course is based on those. I don't like hard skinned fruit like grapes and blueberries so much as the flavours don't mingle that well, but that is really is a matter of liking. Apples, pears, oranges, kiwis, nectarine, peach,... whatever you like!

Loads of different fruit. Here I used:

• 1 fresh pineapple – half price,
• raspberries - 2 for £3, so I had to buy 2 packs of 250g,
• strawberries – half price, 1 pack of 450g
• 2 bananas – only one would have been vanishing between all the other stuff
• 2Grapefruit - with a bit of honey they work as dressing, one would not have been enough for all of it.

This resulted in about 2kg of mixed fruit worth around 1500 kcal.

And

• a big bowl to mix in
• a plastic spoon (you can use a normal metal one, but they tend to cut the fruit when mixing, I don't like wooden spoons either as they are porous, take on flavours and can't go into the dishwasher)
• a bowl with a tissue to collect the rubbish
• a chopping board
• a big knife
• a small knife
• a teaspoon
• about 3 TBS honey (to match the 2 grapefruit)

vitamin bomb
low fat
easy/versatile
Duration:1 hour

Take the small knife and cut along the insides of the skin of each slice. That is a bit fiddly and it doesn't have to be too precise. This is just to cut out the flesh without getting too much of the skin into the bowl. Everything that doesn't come out as a piece of flesh gets squeezed out as juice later.

Take a teaspoon and scrape the piece of flesh from the outside wall using a bit of leaverage. Careful sometimes they come jumping rather voluntarily.

When you emptied the half squeeze it hard to get the rest of the juice out.

Very small pips I ignore, but sometimes they have medium sized which are hard to catch. Get those out.

Mix it all into the honey and then wash the small fruit like raspberries - they go in as whole fruit - and strawberry.

Leave them a bit in a colander so they won't be too wet when they go into the bowl

From the strawberries remove the green bits and chop off everything soft.

Depending on their size quarter or half them.

Don't buy a green one. The top green bit should feel nice and solidly fixed to the fruit, but the skin should respond a tiny bit to pressure. If it is rock hard, then it's not ripe enough.

Using the big knife chopp off the top and the bottom - from the top you can grow a plant by drying the flesh off, removing the leftovers, pop it into soil and hope for the best. But be careful what you are wishing for - they become huge!

However, quarter the thing and then go quarter by quarter.

Slice off the hard peel. You don't want to take off too much, but not too little either. If you would cut it off with no remains of skin on the flesh there wouldn't be lot left over. So remove hard bits which are too prominent using the tip of the knife.

Cut each quarter down to smaller wedges.

Put each wedge on its side and slice off the core which is visible as denser material,

And then slice the remaining wedge into cubes.

Bananas! They are difficult - can you believe it? Firstly, they have loads of calories. So you might want to consider the amount you want to use.

On the other hand they taste great with all the other fruit and compliment the honey-grapefruit dressing so well.

Either you just don't bother or you put them fresh on each portion now having the problem that 1 banana might probably be a bit much.

So just peel it half and use the rest of the skin a natural wrap.

In this case I didn't bother and popped both bananas in.

Then stir and put the fruit salad into a bowl with a lid.

If using plastic make sure that the material is suitable for acidic foods, as some plastic releases chemicals on contact with acids.