Fresh Fruit Salad (GAPS : primal : no refined sweeteners)

This fruit salad is amazingly simple to make and leaves us all licking scraping our bowls every time. The sauce is sweet, tart, and delicious thanks to honey, lemon juice, and my secret ingredient: a dash of milk kefir!  That secret ingredient lends just a touch of creaminess to the sauce, and also makes this fruit salad a source of probiotics too.

This fruit salad delicious on it's own, and can be dressed up for dessert with some sweetened whipped cream or homemade ice cream.  It also makes a great dish for potlucks and community dinners.

Fresh Fruit Salad

• 2-3 medium lemons, to make 1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
  
• 1/4 cup raw mild-flavored honey
• 2 Tb plain milk kefir, preferably made from raw milk (you could substitute whole plain milk yogurt)
• pinch of finely ground celtic sea salt
• 6 cups chopped fresh fruit of your choice
• Our favorite fruit combination includes:
• 2 ripe bananas, sliced
• 2-3 sweet apples, cored and diced
• a couple handfuls of frozen blueberries*
• 1 cup frozen strawberries*, sliced
• sweet-tart fruit such as 2 kiwis or an orange

1. Juice the lemons to make 1/4 cup of fresh lemon juice.  I find that a reamer works wonderfully to get lots of juice out of each lemon.
2. Combine the lemon juice, raw honey, milk kefir, and pinch of salt in a small bowl.  Use a fork to stir a bit, but don't worry that the honey will still be chunky right now.  The honey will have time to dissolve more fully while you prepare the fruit.
3. Chop and dice all of the fruit. Combine it in a large glass bowl**. 
4. Stir up the lemon juice/honey mixture until the honey is fully incorporated.  
5. Pour the lemon/honey mixture over the fruit.
6. Cover the bowl and let it chill in the refrigerator for at least 20 minutes.  Overnight is fine too, although some of the fruit will soften a bit.
7. Since the fruit will have released it's juice, give this a quick stir immediately before serving. This is delicious by itself or fancied-up with sweetened whipped cream (recipe follows) or vanilla ice cream.

*I find that, outside of local berry season, frozen berries have superior flavor and price compared to the fresh berries available in stores.
**Because this fruit salad contains acidic lemon juice, I make sure to store it in a glass bowl.  The lemon juice could probably leach plastic from a plastic bowl.

Sweetened Whipped Cream

• 2 cups raw cream
• pinch of fine ground celtic sea salt
• 1/2 tsp organic vanilla extract
• 2-4 Tb raw mild-flavored honey, to taste***

1. Beat the cream and salt together until the mixture starts to get thick and fluffy.  I like to use my Kitchen-Aid stand mixer with the wire whip attachment, but you could also use a hand mixer.
2. Add the vanilla extract, and drizzle in the honey while the mixer is running.  Alternatively, you could drizzle in the honey a little at a time and mix between each honey addition. 
3. If you're using a stand mixer, use a silicone spatula to scrape down the sides of the bowl a few times to make sure you don't have any clumps of honey at the bottom.  I like to beat it until it gets a bit stiff since it will tend to soften up a bit in the fridge over the next few days.
4. Store the whipped cream in the fridge in an airtight bowl.

***If your raw honey is very crystallized, place it over a bowl of warm water to make it a bit runny.