Fresh Fruit For Rowdy Vegetarians

Fruit salad is a rather nefarious term usually referring to some kind of fructose based nightmare suspended in gelatin that you reluctantly shove down your gullet at a friends’ grandparent house, or a typical mish mash of randomly cut fruits and berries that serve as a buffet throwaway or (apparently) an invitation to sex.

For this tail-end-of-summer salad, we went for a more refined version of what will commonly grace the end of your meal. While we are certainly dessert deficient, we are self proclaimed produce pontificators, and we applied the same love and design we would to a basket of sungold tomatoes, a summer squash and a bunch of green garlic, to a few sweeter growths. With a few sauces and accoutrements, some familiar knife cuts and a little bit of flair, we transported the basic aspect of a fruit salad into a full on plate: more than fit for a dessert option for brunch or dinner.

Coriander Simple Syrup:

½ cup organic sugar
½ cup water
1+½ teaspoon ground coriander

1. Place ½ cup water in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Mix in the sugar and return to a boil. When the sugar is dissolved, reduce to medium heat, add the coriander and mix thoroughly. Let the syrup bubble for five minutes and then transfer to a bowl and chill in your freezer.

Salad:

½ small jicama
1 Asian pear
¼ cup diced cilantro
2 baby bananas
1 Tsp. Cayenne pepper
1 Tbs. Pomegranate molasses

1. Cut the jicama in half, and make the thinnest slices from the exposed flesh side (the middle) until you reach the butt, which will have skin still attached.
3. Stack ¼ of the slices op top of each other and carefully slice off the skin of jicama. When the skin is off, slice thinly and vertically from the once was center of the root to the edge in a thin julienne: making what would resemble batons or matchsticks.
4. Cut the Asian pear in quarters. Placing an exposed edge of the pear against your cutting board, make a diagonal cut from left to right, which will remove the core and seeds of each quarter. Then slice each quarter lengthwise as thin as you can.
5. Snip the tip of a baby banana and peel it. Cut each banana in half using a broad bias.
6. Pick the leaves off the cilantro and chop.
7. Toss the cilantro, jicama, and ½ of the coriander syrup in a mixing bowl.

To plate:

1. Place a handful of the cilantro-corainder syrup-jicama on one side of a plate.
2. Butt a segment of banana against the stack of jicama.
3. Fan out ¼ of the pear against the banana.
4. Garnish with an extra drizzle of coriander syrup, and Pomegranate Molasses.

Beverage: Lambic Kir Royale, Champagne mixed with Cassis Lambic
Soundtrack: Toots and Maytals “Funky Kingston”