Scarlet Fruit Salad with Greek Yoghurt

This luscious salad celebrates all the glorious reds of autumn fruits in South Africa. Plums, prickly pears, red grapes, raspberries and pomegranate seeds are here, plus a few triangles of startling-magenta dragon fruit, which I'm pretty sure is not grown in this country.  Still, I couldn't resist adding them: they may taste disappointingly insipid, but they are real lookers in a fruit salad.

Scarlet Fruit Salad with Greek Yoghurt

I have a slight horror of multicoloured fruit salads, particularly the finely sliced extravaganzas that were such a hit during the health-food revolution of the late Seventies.  I appreciated the idea of the fruit salads my mum prepared with such devotion, but the furry slices of banana and the cubes of paw-paw and the triangles of apple browning in their juices made my tastebuds shrivel, particularly if the salad had been sulking in the fridge overnight.  

Also, someone told me a story that made my toes curl.  A boy scout was charged with the task of making fruit salad for his pack.  "Please clean your nails before you begin," asked the scout master. "Oh, don't worry about that," replied the boy. "By the time I'm finished chopping and mixing all the fruit, my nails will be beautifully clean."

This salad is a red version of my Black Fruit Salad, featured in my cookbook and here (left) in a magazine whose name I can't remember.  

Scarlet Fruit Salad with Greek Yoghurt

4 firm red plums, stones removed, halved and sliced into crescents
250 g raspberries
250 g strawberries, hulled and halved
4 red prickly pears, chilled, peeled and cut into crescents
the seeds of a pomegranate
250 g red grapes, halved and depipped
a small dragon fruit, peeled and cut into triangles [optional]
2 Tbsp (30 ml) icing sugar, or more, to taste
a squeeze of fresh lemon juice
1 cup (250 ml) thick creamy Greek yoghurt

Put all the fruit pieces in a big bowl.  Strew the icing sugar over the fruit, add a spritz of lemon juice and toss gently to combine.  Taste the mixture - if it's very sweet, add a little more lemon juice.

Chill the fruit for an hour or two, or until a light syrup has formed at the bottom of the bowl.  Serve in pretty bowls or glasses, topped with dollops of very cold and creamy Greek yoghurt, or whipped cream, or good vanilla ice cream.  Or you might like to try the voluptuous topping I've used for my black fruit salad - crème fraîche or mascarpone mixed with a little brown sugar and vanilla extract.

Serves 6

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Dragon Fruit on Fan-Rib Skewers

With its blazing pink skin and strange lime-green scales, a dragon fruit looks rather like a prehistoric pod, or the egg of an alien from a far-flung galaxy.  I was intrigued to find dragon fruit, which I have never seen, let alone tasted, at my local Fruit and Veg city last week, so I bought two to take home and show my family.

I've used the bamboo 'ribs' from an inexpensive Chinese fan
 as skewers for the dragon fruit triangles.

The fruit caused a minor sensation, and my kids were particularly intrigued by the cool white flesh of the fruit, which is peppered with black seeds and encircled by an inner band of glowing - almost fluorescent -  fuschia pink.

This tropical beauty, Google tells me, is the fruit of a climbing cactus native to South America (Hylocereus species), and is also known as a pitaya and a strawberry pear.  There are several varieties, including one with vivid pink flesh, and they are cultivated chiefly in Central and South America, and also in parts of Asia such as Indonesia, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines. It has beautiful white flowers that bloom at night and are pollinated by bats and moths.

It's just as well that this is such a flamboyant-looking fruit, because it doesn't really have a blow-your-skirt up flavour. It tastes a little like watery green melon and kiwi fruit, and to my palate has an ever-so-slightly saline aftertaste. Various dragon fruit sites on the Net tell me it's refreshing (and pretty!) in a fruit salad, or served on its own, in chunks, between courses. It's also used in smoothies and sorbets, and as a medicinal drink. It should be served very cold, and is apparently delicious eaten straight from the freezer.

I wouldn't do anything else with dragon fruit but serve it as a novelty (it's perfect for a children's party). The delicate wooden skewers in the photograph above are the ribs from a paper fan I bought at my local Chinese market. I know it may seem wasteful to tear up a fan just for its ribs, but I buy these fans by the dozen, for around R5 each.

Chill the fruit very well before you cut it up, slice it into discs about a centimetre thick, and then cut each disc into six or eight.  Push the skewers through the skin (you may need to make a little cut if the skin is tough) and serve with a spritz of lemon juice.

Please note that the skin of the dragon fruit is not normally eaten (although it's not poisonous) and that I've left it on in the photographs because it's just so pretty. Having said that, I ate the skin, and suffered no ill effects.

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