July 31

I am a fruit fiend at this time of the year. One of my favourite weekly rituals is to go the farmer’s market and choose the best-looking produce that I can find. Obviously, this includes a variety of fruit, straight from the Okanagan Valley. I tend to go for berries, which are beautiful, juicy jewels that make my oatmeal and yogurt so much better and stone fruit, which I love eating on their own, as a snack. Despite the fact that stone fruit are far less reliable than berries- is there anything worse than a mealy peach? – they are my absolute favourite. I typically don’t cook or bake with my summer fruit because they are so delicious raw but when I was faced with making a light dessert for a BBQ last week, I couldn’t think of anything more delicious than a stone fruit, hibiscus fruit salad.



I thought of hibiscus for it’s light floral taste but mostly for the vibrant, deep pink colour that it would give the whole bowl. As I was looking at my spice stash, a saw a small bag of chamomile and couldn’t resist adding it too. I love chamomile iced tea in the summer time, and I knew it would pair perfectly with stone fruit and hibiscus. Mint and lime seemed like obvious choices to boost the flavour overall. The zingy lime helps to balance and enhance the sweetness of the fruit and I love fresh mint. Ideally, your fruit will be perfectly ripe: not too soft but super sweet and juicy. That way, the fruit will hold it’s shape but also add maximum flavour and a bit of sweetness to the fruit salad.


I hope that this fruit salad has time to grace your table while summer fruit is still in season. I know that I will be savouring all the fruit over the next couple of months. While I maintain that there is nothing better than snacking on them raw, having a little fruit salad to generously spoon over some vanilla frozen yogurt, as the vibrant syrup, which has mixed with all of the stone fruit juices puddles at the bottom of your bowl is pretty great too.