These fruits and veggies are up for almost anything. I generally think of fruit salad as consisting of mostly, well, fruit, with maybe a drizzle of yogurt or honey to make things interesting. The Fresh Pear Salad has much wilder ideas, though.
Why just stick to the classic pears, cream cheese, and walnuts when you can invite a can of deviled ham to the proceedings? (I can imagine my childhood self biting into the cream cheese-ham combo with the expectation that it was a berry-flavored cheese, and immediately suspecting that something had gone very, very wrong and I was going to die soon.)
The book has its own knockoff of the very, uh, "popular" Seafoam Cantaloupe Pie, too.
I'm not sure whether it's improved or harmed by using lemon-flavored gelatin in place of the unflavored gelatin and lime juice, or whether three types of cubed melon is preferable to cantaloupe balls, but at least this is just a straight-up gelatin pie rather than a chiffon, so there are no raw egg whites to help augment the salmonella accidentally picked up from the melon rinds.
Of course, there are plenty of classic gelatin molds if you'd rather forego the crust. Here's a way to stretch some expensive exotic avocados:
Combine them with parsley, lime, salt, mayo, cottage cheese, and walnuts in some gelatin, like it will be some kind of a thick, savory dip.... Then serve the mold with citrus and a honey-lemon-ginger sour cream dressing because it's really a fruit salad.
And finally, because I love recipes that consider it a matter of pride to put tremendous amounts of effort into diet recipes in the hopes that the effort will somehow transform the ingredients into something more exciting than they really are, a low-calorie recipe for stuffed tomatoes:
I imagine the tomato flowers filled with be-celeried cottage cheese and carefully-arranged cucumber and hard-cooked egg slices look like they take a while to assemble, so maybe that's excuse enough to say they're too pretty to eat?
Okay, I'm going to go enjoy some actual fresh veggies for lunch-- lettuce, bell peppers, carrots, and sugar snap peas from the grocery (and you can make fun of me for liking to dump a mound of cottage cheese on top of my salad because I hate real salad dressings). Happy fruit and veg season!
I live in the middle of 26000 acres of farm land. The nearest place to buy fresh, locally grown vegetables is about 20 miles away, and they cost much more than the stuff at the grocery store. I laugh and roll my eyes whenever I read something about saving money by going to a farmer's market. Not around here! Not to mention that the markets closest to my house all charge for parking, and there isn't enough of it in the first place. I could ramble on about the lack of public transportation to get to the farmer's markets, etc, etc.
ReplyDeleteI'm imagining the first recipe as a Monty Python skit where the housewife is reading the ingredients off, and then suddenly gets to the deviled ham. There's a pause, and a face made. Then something strange happens, like the cookbook blows up, or the ingredients run away in protest, or maybe the pears turn on her and chase her out of the kitchen. So many possibilities.
I would love to see Terry Gilliam animate that!
DeleteWe do have a farmers' market near enough that I can walk to it, but you've probably guessed that I don't bother. The prices are high, the quality is often questionable, and I've seen some sellers unloading produce from boxes that suggest they're just buying produce (maybe from the same source as the grocery!) and charging inflated prices because it's sold out of the back of a truck rather than under fluorescent lights.