Rainbow Fruit Salad

The cucumber plants have taken over their corner of the garden with the enthusiasm that cucumbers bring to June, the vines running along the fence and setting fruit at a pace that will require daily picking from here through August. I put up the first batch of dill pickles Thursday — eight quarts, a ten-percent brine, a head of dill and two cloves of garlic and a pinch of red pepper in each jar, the same formula I have been using for thirty years. The pickles will not be ready to eat for three weeks, which is the lesson cucumbers teach: abundance first, patience before benefit.

Bill and I had our Sunday call and he reported his first asparagus bed sighting — not the ferns, which are a later development, but the small feathery tips that appear in the second year before the root is mature enough to produce harvestable spears. He photographed them and sent the image. I told him what he was looking at and that he was one year away from cutting his first spear and that the wait was finite. He said he had been waiting a year already and could wait one more. That is the patience the garden requires and the garden gives back if you have it.

The Helen notebook series hit a post this week that brought more mail than any other in the series so far: a 1991 summer pasta she called cold sesame noodles that was not at all traditional, completely invented by her from a magazine she had clipped at the dentist's office and a pantry improvisation. The pasta was cold, dressed with sesame paste and soy and rice vinegar and a little chili oil, topped with sliced cucumber and scallion. Pure 1990s fusion in a Vermont farmhouse kitchen, written in her confident hand with one marginal note: "J. says this isn't Vermont food. J. is wrong." J. is her brother James, who visited that summer. She was right and he was wrong and I told the story without embellishment and the internet agreed enthusiastically with Helen, which felt like justice across thirty-three years.

Helen’s cold sesame noodles — cucumber-topped, 1990s-fusion, defiantly not Vermont food according to a brother who was simply wrong — got me thinking about the way summer abundance asks us to be inventive and celebratory all at once. I had the cucumber patch overflowing, the mail flooding in, and a Sunday-call story about asparagus tips and the patience they demand; what the week wanted for a finish was something unambiguously bright and generous. This rainbow fruit salad is exactly that: no waiting, no brining, no three weeks before you can open the jar — just summer color in a bowl, ready the moment you need it.

Prep Time: 20 minutes | Cook Time: 0 minutes | Total Time: 20 minutes | Servings: 8

Ingredients

1 cup fresh strawberries, hulled and halved
1 cup fresh blueberries
1 cup green grapes, halved
1 cup fresh pineapple chunks
1 cup mandarin orange segments (fresh or canned in juice, drained)
1 cup fresh raspberries
1 cup cantaloupe or mango, cubed
2 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
1 teaspoon lime zest
2 tablespoons fresh mint leaves, thinly sliced

Instructions

Make the dressing. In a small bowl, whisk together the honey, fresh lime juice, and lime zest until fully combined. Set aside.
Prepare the fruit. Wash and dry all fruit. Hull and halve strawberries, halve grapes, cube pineapple and cantaloupe or mango, and drain mandarin oranges if using canned.
Combine. Add all prepared fruit to a large serving bowl, arranging loosely so the colors show — strawberries, blueberries, grapes, pineapple, oranges, raspberries, and melon in a natural rainbow order if you like.
Dress and toss. Drizzle the honey-lime dressing over the fruit and gently fold everything together until evenly coated. Take care not to crush the raspberries or blueberries.
Finish and serve. Scatter the fresh mint over the top. Serve immediately, or cover and refrigerate for up to 2 hours before serving. Stir gently before plating.

Nutrition (per serving)

Rainbow Fruit Salad — When the Garden Overflows, So Does the Table