Fruit Plate for Summers in Arkansas

It is too hot to cook anything now, except maybe stir-fry, and anyway it is Thursday, the start of the weekend during Summer Semesters this year.  Yay! Time for Rum & Lime! So we will discuss stir-fry the Arkansas Way some other time.

Fruit Plate is what we call Fruit Salads, more or less, around the delagar household, b/c we live with tiny miss spoiled child, the emperor kid, who for a long time (this was actually due to the corn syrup allergy we later discovered she had, and only partially to her innate nature) would eat almost nothing: I had to lure her into eating.

The fruit plate was one of the few things she would eat.  It involved the parent and child together selecting a number of fine tasty fruits at the store -- a banana, a pear, some blueberries or blackberries, two or three different sorts of plums, watermelon, a ripe peach.  If you have the sort of child, as I do, who is interested in these things, discuss what each fruit is good for: how watermelon is filled vitamin A and fiber, how blackberries have fiber and vitamin C and potassium, and peaches are really good for vitamin A and pears for your minerals....

At home, find your prettiest plate.  Cut and slice and, if you have a fussy kid like mine, peel the icky fruits.  Leave the peel on as many as possible, since the peels have nutrients in most fruits.  Also, mostly, fruit peelings are tasty. Arrange in artful patterns.  Get the kid involved.  Tell her its art!

In the center put a small dish of real whipped cream.  (If that appalls you too much you can put vanilla yogurt, but come on -- you give the kid ice cream, don't you?  How this any different?  And the fruit!  The kid is eating fruit!  Surely that makes up for the small amount of cream!)

The kid can dip the fruit in the cream or eat in all by itself, as can you.  

You can chill the fruit plate and the cream first if you like.

Eat with bare fingers, by the way.  It's sticky, but great.