Fruit Salad with Hurricane Dressing and Ginger Muffins

How many of you have a hurricane glass from Pat O'Brien's lurking in the back of your glassware cabinet?  Me too.  Two of them.  My first trip to New Orleans was during my sophomore year at IU.  Four of us piled in a Camaro and drove down to see what Mardi Gras was all about.  One of the guys had a friend who was from New Orleans.  Her parents were kind enough to let a whole herd of college kids crash at their house.  There were kids sleeping on about every square inch of floor in their home.  I'm not sure exactly how the bathrooms survived.  That's when I got my first hurricane glass.  From Pat O'Briens. During Mardi Gras.  Fortunately, my mother didn't find out about that trip for, oh, about 30 years.  Aren't memories like that great? 

For the fruit salad, I tried to recreate the flavor of the Hurricane without knocking everyone flat with the rum...  I wanted the ginger muffins to be a nice addition without detracting from the star of that course - the fruit salad. 


Fruit Salad with Hurricane Dressing

Ingredients:

Fruit salad:
1 pineapple cut in 1/2" chunks
Fresh blueberries

Fresh strawberries, cored and halved (quartered if they're big)



Dressing Ingredients:
dark rum
orange juice
pineapple juice
Rose's lime juice
dash of grenadine


Directions:

Dice the pineapple.  Wash, core and dice the strawberries.  Wash the blueberries.  You'll want about equal amounts of each.  Keep them in separate containers until you're ready to toss the salad.

Mix the dressing to taste.  I wound up with about a half cup of dressing to six cups of fruit.  First, I poured a couple of tablespoons of Myers Dark rum into a measuring cup.  Then, I added a couple of tablespoons of orange juice concentrate and about three tablespoons of pineapple juice.  At most I added a tablespoon of the Rose's lime juice.  It's amazing how that took the bite out of the dressing.  Then, just a dash of grenadine.  If you want to leave the rum out, I don't see why that wouldn't work. 

Ginger Muffins

I've talked before about making Sommer's wonderful ginger mulberry muffins.  They were so moist and flavorful that I thought they'd make a wonderful side to the fruit salad.  I left our the mulberries and used more than the amount of crystallized ginger called for in the recipe.  I just dumped a huge handful in - probably 2/3 cup.  Sommer says she's made these with other fillers and they were still really good.  I can imagine lots that'd be good.  Lemon/blueberry (although these lemon/blueberry muffins are still my favorites,) apple/cinnamon, strawberry/rhubarb...  Maybe even something savory like a yellow squash?  Hmmm, an idea to try!
 

Ingredients:
1 c whole wheat flour

1 c all-purpose flour

1 t baking powder

1 t baking soda

1/2 t salt

1 t ground ginger

1/2 c unsalted butter, melted

1/2 c sugar

1/4 c honey

1 large egg

1 c plain yogurt

2/3 c crystallized ginger (I left it in the pieces which were about 1/4")



Directions:


Preheat oven to 350. Mix the dry ingredients together (the first 6.)

Then, mix the wet ingredients together (everything but the ginger.)

Carefully fold in the ginger.

Drop into mini-muffins tins and bake for 12-18 minutes.

The first time I made these (with the mulberries) I overbaked them. This time, I lowered the temp and checked them every couple of minutes after 8. They were perfect at about 15 minutes.

adapted from: A Spicy Perspective (http://aspicyperspective.blogspot.com/