Comfort Food Showdown: Round 1 – #5 Ice Cream vs #12 Fruit Salad

Happy New Year everyone. I hope everyone enjoyed the holiday season. We are once again back with another battle of our Comfort Food Showdown. I thought it would be appropriate in the wake of the annual traditional New Year’s Resolutions we love to make, to pit a healthy option in Fruit Salad vs one of the biggest vices known in the foodie universe, Ice Cream. It might be the only time of year that Fruit Salad might stand a chance in hell to beating a giant in Ice Cream. It might already be over in most minds, but as always lets go over the details for each combatant.

Ice Cream has a lot of variants involved here. Whether we talk about flavors that range from traditional like vanilla, chocolate and strawberry to next level in butter pecan, chocolate chip and cookies and cream to wackadoodle flavors that will make your mind spin. If you ever visited a new ice cream parlor you will know what I mean. Beyond the flavors is how it is served. You can create a personalized ice cream sundae, scoop it on an edible cone, (which also varies a bit), have a cookie sammich, and there are ice cream cakes and pies of all shapes and sizes. The choices are extended to sorbet, gelato, sherbet, and now there are fancy make-it-in-front of you places that shape your ice cream into an art form. The combinations are endless on what you can do with ice cream.

Umm…fruit salad. Well, it is a healthy option as stated above and you can not beat that freshness. There might not be endless combinations, but there are a lot of fruit in the world, so you can get creative in your choices. My Mom put together a can’t miss combination of fruit that when put together it truly is an awesome fruit salad that is quite addictive. I have carried forward this fruit salad and I will share it with you now. Do not question it, the combination works! Either way, please vote under the last paragraph once you are done eyeing my take on the fruit salad.

Mama Goldenberg’s Fruit Salad Formula

While grapefruit is not your atypical favorite and hardly found in most fruit salads, it is the most important ingredient in my Mom’s version. The juices will add quite a bit in the end when it is all put together. It is a pain to scoop out and leave the inner membrane/skin behind, but you do not want it in your salad. So cut the grapefruit sideways and not from the grapefruit’s bellybutton. Get a grapefruit spoon- yes they make those – or a small knife will do. Scoop out the fruit from both halves and add it to your big fruit salad bowl. If it has pits, please discard them or any others you might encounter from here on out without me telling you so. Wow, one whole paragraph on just the grapefruit.

Next we add in the tub of strawberries. What you might say is a tub of strawberries? It is frozen strawberries located in the frozen section of the grocery store found in a small plastic container usually where you see the other frozen fruit and Cool Whip. I have seen it in Safeway and Food Lion chains, but should be in others too. It has sugar in it, so what you will get is a sweet liquid added with your strawberries that is so good you will want to eat and drink the contents once you have sampled it. While these strawberries are not the fresh and healthiest option, and you can still definitely go that route, but it makes the best fruit salad, so there is that. Totally up to you of course, the fresh option still makes a very delicious version that I totally endorse. In any case, empty a defrosted container into the bowl with the grapefruit. I am still only 2 fruits in with 2 paragraphs, I must speed this up a tad, eh?

The third fruit is the pineapple. If you do not want to use fresh- which you have to cut up into small pieces- then do what my Mom would do and buy Dole pineapple tidbits in a can and dump it all in with the juices. We want the 3 juices to mingle with each other here. If you went the fresh direction with the pineapple like the strawberries, you will want to make sure the juice of the fresh p-napple is added in. The 4th fruit is the banana, and you want them a solid yellow color, maybe with traces of a little green, so they will last a few days. Brown bananas are way too sweet and are all squishy and will ruin your salad. Getting a firm one with no spots is great. You will slice it for coin-sized pieces that are not too thick or paper thin. The bananas job here is to soak up the flavors of the juices. You want to eat the fruit salad in 2 days, and if you make it, it should not last past one at any family or party function. Your bananas will start turning after a few days, so keep that in mind.

The 5th and last must add fruit is the red seedless grape. You want the crunch of these guys to add to the soft texture of the salad. Your mind will crave it once you start eating it. Other grapes will not have that same texture or perhaps will jar you with their sharp flavor. The red grape addition is to strictly add texture and give you the added joy you did not know you wanted. The green ones are too soft, so do not be tempted if they are your favorites.

While you definitely can stop with the above 5 fruits, you can easily add in more of your favorites like melons, berries, kiwi, oranges, mango etc. I will leave that up to you. I do love soft honeydew and cantaloupe melons, but it is hard to find good soft ones all the time. A good watermelon during the summer is easy to find, just make sure it is seedless. Mango is a great add too and if you get one of those mega-sized juicy ones from Whole Foods, make sure it is soft to the touch before buying them. Last tip for the fruit salad is to mix it up well, to spread all the juices around. Remember you want your nana to soak in the juices of the other fruits. Let it sit in the fridge a couple of hours and then enjoy! Thank me later.