Fruit salad

There are a lot of recipes for fruit salad,that tell you to add syrups, herbs, maybe a dash of booze - some of these are delicious, especially if your fruit is less than perfect, for example the Italian treatment of strawberries with Balsamic vinegar. I keep a jar of vanilla sugar in my baking ingredients cabinet for jazzing up fruit (it's a Dundee marmalade jar, filled with sugar; I bury any used vanilla bean pods I have into it - even after steeping a pod in milk for a pudding, or scraping the seeds out, the pod will still have a lot of flavor that will go into the sugar).

But even with less than perfect fruit, adding fruits to each other helps enormously - in this fruit salad last night, the watermelon was local and perfectly ripe, but the plums were not quite; the honeydew was a little hard, and both it and the cantaloupe were trucked in from California - but once they all made friends, they achieved a higher level of goodness than any of them had alone.