Aunt Esther's Fruit Salad

My cousin Alice had a great aunt named Esther. Alice never met her great aunt, but this salad that carries her name (we just call it "Aunt Esther's") has graced our Thanksgiving table for more than three decades.  Wouldn't be the same holiday without the salad, or without remembering generations past. With Alice's kind permission:

Sauce for Aunt Esther's

Drain the juice from one can of pineapple slices into a saucepan and heat.

While the juice is heating mix together
1/2 cup sugar
1 heaping tablespoon flour
1 egg

Add to the boiling pineapple juice, stirring constantly until it thickens.  Let cool.

Beat 1 cup heavy cream into whipped cream (no vanilla or sugar)

Fold the whipped cream into the pineapple mixture.
Spread on top of a bowl of diced fruit

Whipping the cream and adding it to the sauce is best done just before you serve it.  This recipe makes enough for a holiday meal, and is more than I otherwise want at one time -  so I keep the sauce in the fridge for 5-7 days and add some to freshly made whipped cream when I mix a bowl of fruit. The fruit in this salad was pineapple, clementine, grapefruit, bananas, melon, empire apple, and pomegranate seeds

This is wonderful in summer with watermelon, strawberries, blueberries or bing cherries as part of the mix.

Sweet Scent of Summer Salad

I always think I'm going to like the corn and bean salads that appear in the deli case, but they usually have cilantro and I can only barely abide the stuff, and especially don't like the smell on my hands if I make something with it.  Besides that, I love the smell of celery, onion, green pepper, and cukes sitting in brine overnight before making relish.

So I decided to make a salad that smelled like summer to me, with no herbs either obscuring or complementing the vegetables. This tastes very bright and clean.  Best, I suppose, with freshly cooked black-eyed peas, but I use canned.  The fresher the vegetables the better it will all taste.  But one of the great things about this salad is that it tastes really good in the winter with store vegetables and canned or frozen corn and peas. The key is a good cucumber.

Once you mince the onion, rinsing it in cold water will remove the sulfur compounds that were released when you cut through the cells, and take away that harsh onion flavor you sometimes get when cut onion sits in a salad.

For a hot pepper I used a jalapeno which has long since turned red, from my garden.  The best looking cucumber was waxed, so I took the skin off - but even in the winter I usually leave the skin on a kirby or English cuke.

Sweet Scent of Summer Salad

1 minced cucumber or 1/2 English cuke. Peeled or not as you wish.
1 minced stalk of celery.
1/3 to 1/2 minced sweet onion,
1/2  minced green bell pepper,
1 small moderately hot pepper - jalapeno or hungarian wax, for example (or hot pepper flakes)
1 can black-eyed peas.
1 can extra sweet niblets, or about 1 and 1/4 cup frozen or fresh corn
2-3 Tablespoon lime juice
2-3 teaspoons canola or olive oil
Salt and a good amount of black pepper 

Optional: minced red bell pepper added for color, but don't skip the green pepper
Optional: 1/2 to 1 teaspoon sugar, if you don't use the extra sweet niblets.
Optional: diced avocado.