Sexy Fruit Salad

Not much makes me sadder than lame fruit salad.  (This is a melodramatic overstatement.  Run with it.)  If I order a fruit salad and wind up with a sorry cup of cantaloupe and grapes, I begin silently cursing the prep cook.

A few weeks ago, the Hubby and I made a trip to a little Italian restaurant in the Galleria.  Their dinner salad highlighted a basic lesson in food editing:  a salad is not the place for you to clean out your vegetable drawer (and in this instance, a pantry).  A salad is the opportunity to create a very unique fusion of flavors - nothing should be there without a purpose.

The most recent local box from Greenling, besides having a gigantic bag of okra that I'm fairly sure we'll never get through, was full of fruit.  I went to chop up one of the Fredericksburg peaches for Lady Bug and I to share and decided instead to make a Damned Sexy Fruit Salad instead.

I'm happy to report that all of the fruit, save for the store bought grapes, all of the fruit was local.  Aside from the fistful of red grapes, I chopped up peaches (3) from Caskey Orchards out of San Marcos, Figs (5) from Comanche Farm, Blueberries from My Fathers' Farm out of Seguin, and the juice of a meyer lemon given to me at Flipside Church Night by a woman who's got a tree full of them in her yard.  I tossed these juicy babies with a tablespoon of blackstrap molasses and a teaspoon of chinese five spice.  I totally meant to add the lemon basil doing chill time in the fridge (from Acadian Family Farms in Lavaca County), but forgot.  No worries, I've got some fresh purple hull peas in the fridge I can toss them with.

While I was "cooking," the Hubby was doing legwork on the installation of a tankless water heater while grabbing two more chickens and some feed from Callahans, this time Rhode Island Reds.  After chatting with a girlfriend of mine who also keeps chickens, we're pretty sure that the Reds get eaten first because they don't have the camoflague that the Barred Rocks have.  We'll see.  Meanwhile, I've named them Quiche and Souffle, mostly because I'm assuming they'll be made into a quick feast by one of our local preditors.  Seeing the new birds next to old, fat Delilah is a study.  For a little while I had felt guilty about cutting down their commercial feed and forcing her to scratch for bugs (though she was living pretty high on juicer pulp and veggie cuttings).  She's about as plump and chickens come, and the yolks in her eggs are Crayola orange.