Fruit Salad with Toppings

Fruit salad is always a good snack—it’s healthy, it’s refreshing, and it satisfies sweet tooth cravings, and it’s even more enticing when finished off with delicious toppings! If you have little ones that don’t love fruit, you can try adding sweet and crunchy toppings to theirs to get them more excited about trying it.  Alternatively, if you have little ones that are fruit fanatics, you can use a fruit salad as a way to get them to eat other sources of nutrients by topping the fruit salad with nut, seeds, or nut butter.  I have provided a list of suggestions for fruits and toppings, but you can use whatever variety of fruit you like and choose whatever toppings you prefer or have on hand.  

Ingredients:

• Fruit:
  • Pineapple
  • Banana
  • Apple
  • Pear 
  • Plum
  • Berries 
  • Mango
  • Peach
  • Melon
• Toppings: 
  • Almond butter 
  • Chia seeds
  • Hemp seeds
  • Sunflower seeds
  • Pumpkin seeds
  • Shredded unsweetened coconut
  • Shaved dark chocolate 
  • Chopped Pecans
  • Agave 

Directions: 

1. Chop fruit into uniform pieces.  
2. Arrange fruit in a bowl. 
3. Top with your choice of toppings. 

If you are using pineapple or melon and feel like getting creative, you can take the fruit out of its shell and reserve it to make a fruit bowl for the fruit salad.  If using pineapple, you can cut the pineapple in half longways.  Then cut the halved pineapple flesh into three spears—the core, and one spear on each side of the core.  The spears can be easily removed.  If there is excess flesh that you could not easily remove with your knife, just scoop it out with a spoon.  If you are using a melon, you can cut the melon in half and use a melon baller to scoop out balls of melon until it is all removed.