E’s Fruit Salad with Strawberry Sauce

I’ve got a couple of new bloggy happenings to announce today. First of all, some of you have already noticed the new format. I’ve spent all week redesigning the blog so that in addition to the bright, shiny new page header, it has a three-column layout that, I hope, will make it easier for people to find what they’re looking for. All of the essential links–to the search box, the home page, the recipe index, my blog list, and Frequently Asked Questions–are easy to find right at the top of each page. If you’re looking for different ways to navigate the site, such as by date of posting or by topic, look a little further down the sidebars, where you’ll also find links to the answers to specific questions, like “What’s that cake in the header photo?” and “What kind of camera do you use?” And you may have noticed that I now have an advertiser. Let’s face it, someone needs to pay the enormous website hosting bills I’m accumulating! I’m very grateful to the BlogHer Ad Network for providing the ads and for assuring me that no meat products will be advertised.

The second new feature, heralded by the logo you see to the left, is something I’ve been hoping to do for a while, but it took a 10-year-old to finally put it into practice. A lot of parents come here looking for vegan dishes that their kids will eat, and I thought what better way to find out what works for children than to have an actual kid help with the creation and cooking of the recipes. My thought was to have my daughter, known here as E, choose the dish to be prepared and come into the kitchen with me to help tweak it to her taste and cook it.

Well, that was the plan. And I’d been thinking about it all summer without doing anything to get it going when E took the initiative and told me that she’d be making our dessert all by herself. And what’s more, she’d be photographing it and writing up the recipe, and I wasn’t allowed to help.

I managed to snap a couple of shots of her as she sliced the first ingredient, but after that (and several warnings about the sharpness of the knife) it was all up to her. She came up with her own unique preparation of fruit salad using the fruit we had on-hand and some strawberries we’d frozen earlier this summer, took the photo below, and emailed me her instructions. Here they are exactly as she wrote them, with a few notes from me in brackets:

E’s Fruit Salad with Strawberry Sauce