Fruit Salad: A Summertime Delicacy

One of my goals for this summer is to eat healthy.

It's so easy to eat quickly and badly during the school year - especially when you're stressed.  There's a huge paper bag of Smarties in my office, left over from when we gave them out to our students. There was so many left... and I managed to eat my way to the bottom within about two weeks. Mind you, it was during a time where final projects were colliding, grading grew to the size of a mountain, and last-minute events to go to filled up every space in my planner. So eating made sense. I was too hungry to leave the Smarties alone, haha.

Now that I'm home, there's more time to be slow and methodical in preparing food. I'm not a cook by any stretch of the imagination - if you watched me try to make something that did not involve a microwave, you'd probably laugh yourself to tears.

However, I do want to enjoy the few months I have of healthy eating before my last year of graduate school begins. So I started off with something simple: fruit salad.

If you've been reading this blog from the very beginning, you might remember an old post I made about apples. In it, I created a story about a wandering apple and also confessed, after periodic grocery shopping, that I've been in search of Pink Lady apples.

Well, I guess they're in season now. I found them. 

All this time, I thought I'd have to pick the apples out from a display, but it turns out that they've been neatly packaged! The bag describes the taste as "zippy and tart." Woah. So I've now learned what zippy tastes like.

So, these aren't Snow White apples, but they certainly look like they've come out a storybook. It must get its name from the pink blush of the skin - the little speckles on the sides also remind me of strawberries. The taste, since we're on the subject, is really amazing. Some regular apples like Golden Delicious have a kind of dull taste to them - but Pink Ladies are very sweet, tart, and packs a punch of flavor. It's like I've never eaten an apple before this one, haha.

With the apples found, I decided to start on the fruit salad.

Chopping up ingredients for the salad: strawberries, bananas, watermelon, and assorted nuts like peanuts and almonds to toss on top.

But of course, I didn't forget about the apple. For a regular bowl of fruit salad, I discovered that one apple is quite enough. I discovered this by chopping up and tossing in two apples, haha. 

Me and my apple-chopping moves. Actually,  I was really clumsy. It took me forever to chop the first apple in half. I need more practice. And, of course, where would I be without a Disney shirt? Nowhere, that's what.

And then, when you toss 'em all together, it creates a very lovely fruit salad. The thing is, I got so hungry while making this that I ate it very fast. So I feel like, when I make more in the future, I need to do it on a full stomach. All that chopping and cutting was very relaxing though, and I enjoyed just concentrating on preparing the salad. My mind is always running and, even in my spare dozing time, I'm always thinking about writing. So to focus on something else for a bit was nice. 

Done! Believe me, the other fruits are in there. Just on the bottom, haha. All attempts to mix it had been thwarted by pieces of apple flying all over the place.

So ta-da! It's not the recipe post I imagined, but I think it does the job (considering how I eat out of a microwave and yet watch Food Network constantly). What are your plans for summer? What kinds of food will you make to beat the heat?