Mornings in Oaxaca, Mexico, are always lovely. There is a slight chill in the air that dissipates as we eat a leisurely breakfast on a rustic stone terrace a few feet from our room at Hotel Las Golandrinas (“The Swallows”). 

We stayed at this hotel for a couple of years when we first started visiting Oaxaca. There we were surrounded by fruit and flowering trees and a multitude of colorful, handmade ceramic pots filled with fragrant blooms. It was an unbelievably lush world in which to greet the day. 

My sister Janet and I always began breakfast by ordering a platter of fresh fruit. The selection varied daily, but more often than not there were wedges of lightly perfumed, deep-orange papaya, ultra-sweet pineapple, bananas, cantaloupe and juicy mango. The fruit was often drizzled with yogurt and always garnished with tiny, puffed amaranth (an ancient grain treated in this instance like puffed rice), and sometimes a fistful of granola. 

Janet and I couldn’t get over how vibrant the fruit tasted.

Many years earlier, when I traveled solo to Negril, Jamaica, I would walk early each morning to a market a short distance from my hotel. Vendors there hawked T-shirts, handmade beaded jewelry and other crafts, as well as locally grown fruits and vegetables. On my first day there a woman called out to me, her hand outstretched. A cluster of miniature bananas, each around three or four inches long, sat in her palm. I bought them, along with a small coconut. 

After giving me my change, she presented me with a gift of a grapefruit, its skin blushed with red. I returned to her rough-hewn wooden stall each morning thereafter, and always she gave me a gift along with my purchases, often introducing me to a gem I had never seen or tasted before. The jackfruit, with its yellow-gold flesh, was sweet and aromatic. Soursop had a creamy pulp. And though I’d tasted guavas, passion fruit and pomegranates before, their flavor was so much purer and sparkling there on the island where they had been picked a short while before they were stacked for display.

Every year as the warm weather moves in, I begin to crave fruit salad. From late June through early September, I make my way with joy through the abundance of berries, melons, juicy stone fruits and pulpy grapes. 

Now that this summer is in full swing, I make dozens of fruit salads, sometimes augmenting them with store-bought kiwis, citrus fruits or mango or bananas, but more often than not they are celebrations of home-grown bounty. Sometimes they are accompanied by creamy, soft scrambled eggs I garnish with grated parmesan and fresh garden chives, or a juicy heirloom tomato salad and crusty bread. 

Often, we eat the fruit salad beneath a blanket of thick and tangy Greek yogurt, topped with Beach Lake Bread’s excellent granola. Or I bake golden popovers or a fluffy Dutch baby, which is a sort of giant puffed pancake traditionally served with lemon wedges and dusted with confectioner’s sugar. Italian frittatas: thick, slightly dense omelets made in a well-seasoned cast iron skillet, go perfectly with fresh fruit salad, as do omelets and freshly baked tea breads. 

As the season progresses and different fruits pop up at the farmers’ market, I change up my fruit salads, adding melon chunks, pitted cherries, various types of berries and any other fruit that looks appealing and is at its height of flavor. Fresh garden mint, flaked coconut or slivered, toasted almonds add flavor and texture to these salads. They’re all beautiful and tasty in their own way. 

I offer you recipes here, and online you’ll find a small gallery of photos of the “fruits of my labor.”