Notes on fruit salad

I’ll keep it brief. A fruit salad containing apples, oranges, grapefruit, furry watermelon, slimy bananas and crumbling kiwi fruit makes me lose the will to live. Not all the above-mentioned fruit (i.e. banana and kiwi) are a bad idea but they must be added only just before serving. Apple segments with the skin left on and pithy orange segments just remind me of school. If you are adding oranges, the fruit segments must be released of all pith and inner skin. Mandarins take precedence over oranges, but peeling off their little segment skins is a real labour of love/bore. Passion fruits wake up a salad no end, as do really acidic, sweet pears with that peardrop taste. Pineapple must be fresh, not tinned, and ripe like the mangoes. If you can find Alphonso mangoes with their techno-orange flesh, you have made the salad even better. I love papaya, but good fragrant ones are hard to find and many people detest this fruit anyway. Grenadine, used as the sweetener, is a good replacement for straight sugar. I like adding pomegranate seeds too, but you may find things a bit seedy, what with the passion fruit. I, however, like this. Lime juice and zest catapult a fruit salad into something mouth-watering.