Maushi's Summer Salad

Hello from sunny India! After some travel adventures including missed connections, 10 hours spent in Heathrow airport, 2 consecutive nights on long-haul flights and a lost bag, we are finally here. Bombay feels more like the inside of an pressure cooker than anything else, but Southern Maharashtra is quite nice with pleasant mornings and breezy evenings. And the food, oh the food! Ever since we landed, life has just been a series of delicious meals, punctuated with platters of ripe mangoes.

A couple of days ago, my aunt ("maushi" is aunt in Marathi, specifically the term used for your mom's sister) made us a fantastic dinner. One of the things she made was an unusual salad of fruit and veggies mixed together. As I watched her make it, I admit being a little skeptical of how the flavors would work together. In the end, this salad was a tasty and refreshing counterpoint to the rest of the rich dishes served that night- spinach-mint pulao, paneer-peas curry and okra masala. I had to share this easy recipe in this space.

It could not be simpler. Peel and cut the following into small neat dice and mix together:
1 apple (don't need to peel this)
1 orange
1 sweet lime (mosambi)
1 cup canteloupe melon
2 cucumbers
2 bell peppers (any colors...yellow/red/orange peppers look beautiful but she used green this time)
Toss with salt, freshly ground pepper and a dash of cinnamon powder. Eat!



This sounds like a fruit salad but is actually very crunchy and savory and wonderful with a meal. My maushi is a superb cook and loves to garnish her creations beautifully. She planned to carve some elaborate decorations that evening for the salad. But we dragged her off for some shopping and she was left with very little time. She managed to grab a pair of kitchen scissors and use the orange and sweet lime peels from the salad-making to make these quick flowers and leaves that you see in the picture.

I managed to write this post through a rather uncooperative dial-up connection. I'll keep posting as and when I can. Bye for now!