Pistachio Fruit Salad

Summer deepens. The garden is producing — the perilla is chest-high, the green onions are thick, the chili peppers are ripening from green to red. I pick perilla every morning and use it in everything: wrapped around grilled meat, chopped into salads, laid on top of rice with a drizzle of soy sauce. The garden is my balcony in Busan, transplanted to Wallingford. The garden is Jisoo's garden, growing in American soil. The plants do not know they are immigrants. The plants just grow.

Hana is nineteen months old. Her language is exploding — she speaks in two-word combinations now: "more bap," "outside play," "halmoni call." She is constructing sentences from two vocabularies, building bridges between English and Korean with the unselfconscious ease of a child who does not know that this is unusual. For Hana, there are not two languages. There is just language. There is just the way you say things to the people you love, and sometimes you say them in English and sometimes in Korean and sometimes in both at once and nobody corrects you because the communication is the point, not the grammar.

Banchan Labs: the Jisoo's Kimchi product launch is in development. We are testing jar sizes, shelf life, labeling. The kimchi will be sold separately from the subscription — in 16-ounce jars, shipped cold, labeled with Jisoo's name and a photo of her hands. The hands. The hands that are on the wall of my kitchen. The hands that make the kimchi. The hands that are also my hands. The branding is not a marketing decision. The branding is a love letter.

Karen had a hard week. She fell on Tuesday — at home, in the hallway, a stumble that David caught before she hit the ground. The fall was minor — no injury, just a scare — but the scare was significant because it was the first fall in six months and because falls in Parkinson's patients are a milestone, a marker of progression, a signal that the balance is deteriorating faster than the medication can manage. David called me after. His voice was steady but I could hear the underneath: the fear, the exhaustion, the slow accumulation of worry that lives inside a caregiver's body like a second heartbeat. I drove to Bellevue on Wednesday and sat with Karen while David napped. Karen said, "I fell." I said, "I know." She said, "I'm fine." I said, "I know." She said, "Stop looking at me like that." I said, "Like what?" She said, "Like I'm fragile." I said, "You're not fragile." She said, "Exactly. I fell. I did not break. There is a difference."

The recipe this week is a summer perilla salad — my garden's perilla, dressed simply. Fresh perilla leaves, stacked and rolled and sliced into ribbons. Tossed with sliced cucumber, sesame oil, soy sauce, rice vinegar, minced garlic, sesame seeds, and a pinch of gochugaru. The salad is fragrant and green and tastes like summer and like Korea and like the garden I planted because Jisoo has a garden and because the things my mother grows, I grow too. The perilla continues. The garden continues. Karen fell. Karen did not break. We continue.

The perilla salad I described above is too simple to need a written recipe — it’s a handful of things from the garden, a drizzle of sesame oil, done. But the spirit of the week — abundance, color, the sweetness underneath the worry — called for something I could bring to Karen and David’s table in Bellevue without a second thought: something cheerful, something that feeds a crowd, something that asks nothing of the people eating it. This Pistachio Fruit Salad has been in my back pocket all summer for exactly those moments. It’s the dish that says I was thinking of you when you don’t have the words for anything heavier than that.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 0 minutes | Total Time: 10 minutes | Servings: 8

Ingredients

1 (3.4 oz) package instant pistachio pudding mix (dry, unprepared)
1 (8 oz) container frozen whipped topping, thawed
1 (20 oz) can crushed pineapple, undrained
1 (15 oz) can mandarin oranges, drained
1 (15 oz) can fruit cocktail, drained
1 cup mini marshmallows
1/2 cup shelled pistachios, roughly chopped
1/2 cup sweetened shredded coconut (optional)

Instructions

Combine pudding and pineapple. In a large mixing bowl, stir the dry pistachio pudding mix directly into the undrained crushed pineapple until fully combined. The pineapple juice activates and thickens the pudding mix — no milk needed.
Fold in the whipped topping. Add the thawed whipped topping and fold gently until the mixture is smooth, pale green, and evenly blended.
Add the fruit. Fold in the drained mandarin oranges and drained fruit cocktail, taking care not to break up the orange segments.
Add marshmallows and pistachios. Stir in the mini marshmallows and chopped pistachios. Add shredded coconut here if using.
Chill before serving. Cover the bowl and refrigerate for at least 1 hour (or overnight) to allow the salad to firm up and the flavors to meld. Serve cold, straight from the bowl.

Nutrition (per serving)

Pistachio Fruit Salad — The Garden Keeps Growing