Fruit Salad Anyone?

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and I am in charge of the fruit salad. Well, I'm also in charge of the birthday cake for the hostess (I can say this because I know she doesn't read my blog) and I just retrieved the 3 layers of checkerboard cake from the oven. After it cools I will frost it in cookies and cream fashion with vanilla and chocolate frosting and crushed Oreo's. The most difficult thing about the cake is my kitchen - where anything more challenging than Top Ramen can be an ordeal. But it's the fruit salad. I admit, I just don't GET fruit salads. We didn't have them on the table when I was growing up, and I never made them for my kids. For one, I don't like my fruit touching. I don't see the appeal of a strawberry flavored piece of banana - or a banana flavored strawberry. And I never know how creative I can get with these things. (This isn't the first time I have been asked to bring one.) The first year, I carved a watermelon to look like a basket- and threw all the cut up pieces of fruit back into the watermelon shell. That was well received and disappeared quickly. But one year, for my grand son's first birthday I went berserk and made a fruit 'bouquet" - drove 100 miles with the thing in my car - placed it on the table, and nobody ate the damn thing. It was being treated like a non-edible center piece. Not wanting a few good hours of my time to go to waste I started dismantling it myself and handing out the fruit skewers. Yes, I did. I just said 'first birthday party' and skewers in the same breath. Two and a half years later and I have not sufficiently recovered from the sheer terror of little kids and sharp wooden objects with food on them.

So, this year, I'm just going to present the fruit in a nice bowl, bite size pieces, no raisins or coconut (or melons due to allergies) - and put it on the table somewhere (salad side? desserts?). Well, I didn't initiate this so quite probably the person who did - will know where to put it. (Or at least have some opinion about that - if she actually DOES read my blog.)