Summer, it seems, is in full swing around here!  Though last weekend was rather low key for us (we spent the 4th at a friend’s house shooting fireworks off in his street – the joys of living in a state where they’re legal), we found ourselves rather busy this weekend and actually have the next few booked up.

Friday night we had a nice leisurely dinner with some friends then headed to Wal-Mart to pick up supplies for a surprise party that we threw another friend yesterday evening.  I then spent all day yesterday preparing food and myself and hanging out with my little brother before heading over to the party location to setup.  After that it was eating and drinking and celebrating and swimming and I’ll tell you what, last night was the perfect night for swimming!  Warm and balmy but not overly humid and even the water was nice and warm to where you didn’t get a chill from being in it.  I think I have to get myself a pool, or at least make a point to visit one more often.

Today, as a result of me feeling just flat-out exhausted, we didn’t do much.  I slept in and sat around for awhile trying to force myself awake.  Then in the early afternoon I decided I couldn’t take the clutter and mess that had overtook my house, so I spent the afternoon picking things up, doing laundry and going through some cubbies in the kitchen and laundry room as part of my overall ‘get rid of useless shit’ campaign that I have taken on the past few weeks.

And now it’s time for True Blood and just the general wrapping up of another week and preparing for a new one.

Tonight though, I would like to share with a recipe.  I’ve never done this before, despite wanting to, but I figured I’d try something new because, well, I like food and I like sharing good food with people.  This doesn’t mean I’m a good cook but I try and get by, somewhat.  I basically like things quick, easy and accessible and most of the food we tend to eat can be rather plain – we are only mildly (and by mildly I mean rarely) adventurous eaters.

That being said, I was looking for something interesting and different but festive to take to this evening pool party last night and stumled upong this recipe for Fruit Salsa and homemade Cinammon Sugar chips (on AllRecipes) and decided it fit the exact idea I was looking for.  I took my own liberties with the recipes and came up with a delicious, fairly easy and perfect summer dish!  I also received tons of compliments on it and numerous requests for the recipe so I might as well share it with y’all too!

Happy preparing!

Fruit Salsa

5 peaches
1 lb. strawberries
2 Fuji apples
1 pint blueberries
1 jar fruit preserves

At the simplest level, dice the peaches, strawberries and apples into small, “salsa” size pieces.  Mix them together is a large bowl with the blueberries.  Then throughly mix the preserves together with the fruit.  Cover and chill.

Now for some details.

The recipe originally called for kiwis, raspberries, strawberries and and apples but I don’t like kiwis and couldn’t find raspberries so I substituted, which is the beautiful thing about this recipe.  I’m sure you can substitute almost any fruit that’s in season.

Part of the key to this recipe is that the berries and fruit make their own “juice”.  The recipe originally called for some white and brown sugar to be added but I omitted it at the suggestion of others on the site and I’m glad I did because it definitely would have been way too sweet had I added it.  Also, I used a jar and a half of preserves because it didn’t seem like it would be enough but next time, I’ll use just as a jar because it, combined with the natural fruit juices, made the salsa a bit too liquidy for my taste.

For the preserves, I used apricot and they were delicious!  Others have suggested strawberry and regular grape jam.

Overall, people loved the salsa and I received tons of requests for the recipe so I’m going to add it to my repertoire and continue to experiment with it to find out what other different things I can do with it.

Homemade Cinnamon Sugar Chips

10 flour tortillas
Butter flavored cooking spray
Cinnamon & sugar mix

Another basic level recipe – spray both sides of the tortilla, slice into chip size pieces, coat with cinnamon sugar mixture then bake at 350 degrees for approximately 9-11 minutes.

Again, since this is a very easy recipe that you can take liberties with, I’ll share my tips with you and you can modify them accordingly.

I started off spraying a tortilla, cutting it, coating it with cinammon sugar then baking it but this was rather time consuming.  By the end, I would take a tortilla, spray both sides, stack it on a plate, then spray another one on both sides and stack it on top of the original one.  I did this for about four tortillas before I cut them then just left them on the plate and coated enough chips at a time that would fit on the pan.

The easiest way I found to coat them is to mix the cinnamon and sugar together in a ziploc bag (about 1/2 cup sugar to 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon, though don’t quote me on those measurements as I just eyeballed it – it should look more like dirty sugar and not brown sugar) then drop about four to six chips in at a time and shake the bag.

The hardest thing to gauge was baking them.  I wasn’t sure if the sugar was supposed to turn the sugar dark brown and crystallize it or if it was ok for them to look like you could still brush the sugar off.  It took me a few batches to figure out that I was looking more for the chips to just get hard and crunchy to the touch instead of the sugar crystallizing.  So just feel it out for a few sessions and you’ll get comfortable with it.

After that, serve the chips with the salsa – dipping them in the fruits is absolutely delicious!

Overall, I really enjoyed making this and loved that it was fairly easy but well received.  The chopping up of the fresh fruit was really only the more labor intensive part – it took about two and a half hours to get everything as finely chopped as  I needed it, but it was well worth it!

As of now, we still have quite a month planned.  Next weekend, we are going to Myrtle Beach for a long, relaxing time at the beach to celebrate another friends birthday.  I’ve equated it to a big slumber party where we grill out, play some board games, hang out on the beach all day and just generally relax.  The following weekend is fairly free but the weekend after that we heading to Pennsylvania for a week-long visit with the family.

Overall, I have quite a bit to look forward to and while life is rather busy and chaotic still, it’s these little things that give me something to look forward to.

Hope you all are having a good summer so far and if you try the recipe, let me know how it went for you!