Tropical fruit salsa, we are going to start out with a pineapple. This particular pineapple is your Columbian pineapple. In Jamaica we call this a sugar pine. A very sweet, very flavorful, great pineapple to use. We are going to use some mangoes. Mangoes, they grow all over the world. Mostly in tropical countries, hot countries, South-East Asia, Africa, India, the Islands, Florida, places like that.

Papaya, papaya is indigenous to the Mexico, you've got them quite a bit at -- a lot of them in Latin America, lot of them in the islands, lot of them in Africa. Hawaii again is a big, big name that comes up when you talk about papayas and those kind of fruits. This is your Mexican papaya. Hawaii has a different papaya and it's a little bit, the flesh is bright yellow. It has a lot more seeds in it than your Mexican papaya does and the flesh is not as bright orange as this one is.

This is nice, very nice to work with. Specially for fruit salads. We are going to slice into the papaya and get the skin off of it. As you can see, I have already cut in here, I have removed one half of the papaya and we are just going to peel it. Get the skin off of it and we are going to do a nice tropical fruit salsa. It's your salad I mean, I am sorry.

Fruit salads are wonderful especially in the summer time because you can use any fruits that you might have in your refrigerator or you pick up in the supermarkets for fruit salad. If you have kids or you just want to entertain your friends or you just want to have a nice snack that is not as heavy but pretty light and tasty. It's good to, just go to the supermarket, pick the fruits, melons are in season right now. It's great to use melons.

I choose tropical fruits because I just like the flavors of tropical fruits it gives off. And I am actually going to put a little apples in there to get some crunch out of it. But also with you making the fruit salad, I like to give it a little bit more flavor. So, we are going to use some brandy and we are going to get that nice and hot.

Now, when you use liquor be careful, you might get drunk by putting that much liquor in the fruit. But not necessarily, the alcohol probably would burn off. So, I am going to go ahead and put some sugar in there. We let it cook. We are going to add to it. little bit of coconut milk. Little bit of coconut milk. It should give you a really good flavor. Okay. We'll let that cook a bit. And we are going to add a little cream to it.

Now you can also add some vanilla to this product. You can add a little bit of nutmeg if you care to, a bit cinnamon. We are going to let it sit, let it reduce, while I am still working on the fruits for the fruit salad. Now the good thing about a fruit salad is you can get as creative as you want to get with it. You can choose whatever fruits you want to use. You can dice them up. You can use berries. You can use apples, you can use coconuts. You can add nuts to it. You can use coconut flakes. So many wonderful things out there that you can add to your fruit salads and just make it a lot of fun. You can get real creative with it. You can get creative with the colors. You can pick up those machines now that they have in the stores if you want to make ice-cream out of it and puree the fruit in a food processor and use it as your base to make, add to your ice cream. And that's also another idea you can go with. But those are just ideas. This is what we are doing today. We are going to do today a fruit salad with it instead.

Now, I am going to add a sauce to it. But you don't have to add a sauce to it. You can just go ahead and wonderfully peel the fruits and mix them together without any sauce, which is naturally the best way to go. Because you don't have any added fats or sugar any of that. You are going with the natural flavor of the fruits. Now we will just let that reduce a bit. Let us stay there and do what it needs to do and we are going to add that to the fruit a little bit later on as we go. Okay. We've got the papayas gone, we are going to cut into the pineapple.

Now with pineapple, it's one of those fruits that if you are not careful when you cut into it and you remove the skin from it, it can scratch your mouth, your lips or any of that. If you leave the, I call it the eye of the pineapple. But these are actually little pockets where the seed grows into. See, when you cut into, you have got to take off a large piece of the flesh in order to remove these things from the pineapple seed. Cut into it, remove the eyes of the pineapple. You don't want to leave those in there because that is not, it scratches. It is just the part of the skin that you want to get rid of.

Don't think you are wasting the pineapple by doing this. If you get to that point and you say, wow! Man that's a lot of the pineapple I have taken off. What you can do is you can put it in some boiling water. Add some sugar to it. Let it boil for maybe half-an-hour or so. Strain it later on. Add some lemon juice to it and drink it just like that. You make a drink out of the pineapple, so instead of having the juice you would make a pineapple drink out of it. That's another idea.

Other than that, there isn't really much more you can do with the skin of the pineapple, other than making juice out of it or some form of punch. That will be the best thing you could do with it. Now, we are going to dice the pineapple. You can slice it, you can dice it, whichever makes you comfortable in preparing your fruit salad. Make it become your own salad, not necessarily something you see a chef do or it's becomes yours.

These are genips. Genips are native to the islands, actually in South East Asia you find quite a bit of this. In China, they have another product that is indigenous to those areas what they call lychee, and rambutan and there is longans. The rambutan is mostly red. I think, I said, I was on another show and I said it was smooth. It's not smooth. It's red and it's pretty fuzzy. The longans and the other one is a smooth texture, such as the genips and they are almost similar texture of genips but the seeds are a bit different and the taste is a little different.

These you will find in Haiti, Mexico has them and different places have given different names. In Jamaica we call these genips. And as a boy I remember climbing trees and picking bunches of these off. If you are not careful the branches around, are brittle. So you can fall. So, you have got to be really careful.

But we are going to put some of them in our fruit salsa today. This is pretty much done. We are going to let it, turn it off. Let it sit over here for a bit. While we are assembling the rest of the fruit salsa. Now, the summer time is so much fun if you love food and you want to cook and you want to go out there and get, be adventurous with food. The best time is the summer time, because a lot of things are coming in this season. We have a lot of fresh products come to market. Lot of melons, lot of apples, lot of lettuce, you name it. There is a lot of products around the market.

And there is just so much, and the good part about it is that they are a lot cheaper during the summer time, versus when you start getting cold because it's obvious, you cannot grow food in the cold season. It's just not going to grow. Or if you do get products that's coming from another country where you have to spend a little bit more money for the product. So, the summer time, you can grow so much more product and you can get it so much more cheaper.

So, if you want to be adventurous I would recommend, late spring, going into the summer, best time to get a lot of your product. Tomatoes and this time of year you have a lot of kiwis in your supermarkets. A lot of those products are out there. You can pick up relatively cheap. Free for 99 cents, melons, 5 pound for a dollar. In some cases they are 99 cents a pound. So, you can get them relatively cheap and you can grow and you can play around with them. You can take these. You can mix them into drinks where you add little water to them, a little bit of sugar to them and it makes a great drink.

For mangoes you can blend them with a little cream and they are just wonderful. Make wonderful smoothies that way. You can mix them into, put them in bottles. Put wine on them. Let them sit. You have got basil if you want to add to. So many of the things you can do with fruits, especially salads. You can combine the fruits with the salads. You can put walnuts, pecans, add blue cheese, so many different things you can do that just give you so many wonderful flavors.

We would just peel the mango. As I have told you about the mango earlier. We are going to add a little bit of apple. Typically apples in the islands are not like these. Apples at home or you resembles pairs, they don't resemble your American or European apples there. Very, very different. The seed in the middle is a large a seed and not several small seeds. Very different taste. They have a more aromatic, smell more like roses than they do apples.

Very different, very interesting. Now the problem with some of the tropical fruits is that they don't import them in the US and some other countries, because some of those products do carry a certain pest that they don't want to bring into this country, that would also infest other fruits in this country. So, a lot of times, they have a tendency to stay away from certain tropical fruits. Or if they do have them they try to go on here where they can control certain bugs.

So, we are going to add a little apple, to give it a crunch, more of a texture. Remember the genips that I put in there earlier, they do have a pit in them. So, we have got to be careful when we are tasting that product that you don't bite on or swallow any of those. You can bite the seed, it won't, it's not that tough but it would be more fearful if you swallow it without chewing on the seeds.

Okay? Now, whenever you make any sauce, I normally use a little bit of salt and the reason why I use salt is that salt is a wonderful stabilizer. It allows the sugar to come out more and it allows any other flavor to come out. So, that's why you put salt in meat, so you get a true flavor of the meat.

Similarly, anything you use, if you add a little salt to it, just one of those wonderful ingredient that nature provides us that is universal and cooking with that helps to enhance the flavor. A lot of people will ask, well, is salt a seasoning? What does it do? Salt is a stabilizer. It balances your flavors. Sugar does the same thing too. So something to keep in mind.

Alright. Now, this pretty much almost wraps up. I am going to squeeze one lime over the fruit salsa and a part of the reason why I did not add the lemon earlier to the cream is that, when you add an acid to cream it coagulates. It breaks up the fat. So, you don't want to do that. But when you cook it with sugar, you won't have that problem. So, that's why I put the lemon inside the fruit, instead of over inside the salt earlier. Okay. Now, what we will do is we'll go ahead and we'll add some Boston lettuce that we picked earlier. I am going to use those to serve our plate with for the presentation.

This is a really, really nice lettuce. It's very flexible. You can do so much with it. Very soft, nice, crunchy, great flavor. We are going to pick through it a little bit but other than that, it's wonderful. Now, we will pour some of the fruits out right in there and this is just wonderful looking.

And we are going to pour some of the sauce right over it. See when I do a plate presentation I like to pile it high, give it a mount, it just looks so much more prettier when it's nice and tall. So, we will put a little bit there. And we are going to take couple of the genips that we had earlier and we are going to put genips right on top. That's your tropical fruit salad.