Hiroki’s Fruit Salad

I have been making fruit salad every morning for more than a quarter century. Some of my friends say, “You should open a fruit salad stand in front of your house once you retire.” I don’t want to compete with kids’ lemonade stands. Besides, the cost and time of making fruit salad will make me lose my retirement pension much faster than gambling at an Indian casino.

Required Attitude in Making Fruit Salad: Patience

Ingredients: fresh fruit except those that change colors after peeling such as apples, pears, and bananas. Main ingredients that become the year round base of the fruit salad are seedless watermelons, pineapples, peeled seedless grapes and honey. You may add seasonal fruit such as honey dew melon, cantaloupe, various kinds of berries, and kiwifruit.

Making the fruit salad: slice seedless watermelon and pineapple in about one inch by one inch rectangular cubes. Put them in a bowl. Put two or so tablespoons of honey on top. Add any other fruit of your choice. Peel grapes and put them in the bowl. As you add a layer of fruit, put honey. After finishing piling up fruit in the bowl, mix it up thoroughly. If you slice kiwifruit after peeling it, gently place the slices on top to add nice green color to the fruit salad.

Peeling grapes: Peel grapes one by one. This requires patience. Treat this as a form of meditation. Some grapes are hard to peel. Seedless grapes are better since they can be peeled without slicing them in half. To peel 50 grapes it takes between 20 and 30 minutes. The more you peel them, the tastier your fruit salad becomes. Choose grapes that are hard to peel, only if you want to get frustrated. You learn from experience which grapes are hard to peel. Some grapes are easy to peel while others are hard to peel:

• #4022 “Green Seedless grapes” are white grapes, relatively hard to peel and hard on your thumb nail but once peeled they are delicious.
• #4023 “Red Seedless gapes”: small round red grapes, relatively hard to peel, grape skin easily breaks.
• #4056 Oval or round shaped black seedless grapes, Oval shaped ones are relatively harder to peel than round shaped ones. Sometimes skin easily breaks.
• #4636 “Red Globe Grapes”: large round grapes, most of them easy to peel, but they have seeds inside. Cut a grape in half, take seed out and peel. I like this grape best whenever it is available.
• #4273 “Queen X-Mas Rose Cardinal”: Round red grapes similar in look to #4636. They are easy to peel but have seeds inside. Cut a grape in half, take seed out and peel.
• #4499 “Red seedless grapes”: relatively easy to peel.

Choice of fruit: Watermelons, pineapples, and grapes are available nowadays all year around thanks to the global agro-business and exploitation of Mexican or Chilean cheap labor. In the summer cherries, strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries are welcome ingredients to the fruit salad. In the winter, grapefruit and large navel oranges add to the flavor. Remove thin white membrane that covers the meat of the grapefruit and navel orange to prevent a bitter taste. Also, pit cherries with a cherry pitter.
Notes: People ask me “Why do you peel grapes?” I am not sure why I do. Perhaps as punishment to myself—like the religious self-flagellation of Moslem men? Peeling fruit is the Japanese obsession and tradition. Japanese peel everything.