There is a two-week stretch at the end of August when the fruit bowl needs a little more exploration. The peaches are at their best and about to be gone. The first pears have come in, still hard, not ready for anything. Nobody knows quite what to do with a fruit bowl in transition, so most of it goes soft on the counter.

Possibly one of the best culinary moments of my entire life was eating a perfectly ripe peach after a soccer game when I first moved to San Francisco after college.

I was part of an adult league, and we traveled outside of the city, and there was a peach stand on the way home where we stopped.

I unsuspectingly picked up a peach, assuming it would be the same as all the ones I’ve had before. However, it wasn’t. This peach was nearly perfect.

Perhaps the connection to that moment, or just an awakening to the delicate flavors that live inside peaches when they’re perfectly ripe – which only happens for a short time every year has led me to create this salad each year. However, this year I did something a little different. I made them into a salad.

This salad came together in what I might describe as a moment of serendipity. I haven’t made this before, but I had opened the coconut condensed milk as a topping for a homemade peach sorbet.

A fruit salad that is as amazing as any dessert

Many palnt based fruit salads have heavy coconut cream, honey, marshmallows, a cup of yogurt. By the time you finish dressing it, the fruit is no longer so apparent.

I wanted to create something that complemented the flavor. This dressing has four ingredients; it pours in a thin ribbon rather than coating anything, and it is built on vinegar and fresh ginger. It has one tablespoon of sweetened condensed coconut milk in it, for four servings.

The ginger enhances the salad with a slightly savory taste. Enjoy this dish after a heavy lunch in the mid-afternoon when cravings for something sweet might arise.

How to Peel a Peach

Taking the skin off the peaches for some makes them more palatable in salad. Here’s how to do it. Score a shallow cross through the skin at the base of each peach. Drop them into boiling water for thirty seconds, then straight into ice water. The skin peels away from the cross with your fingers.

Anthocyanins, the compounds that make blueberries blue and that have been the focus of most research, degrade with both temperature and time. In an analysis of blueberries prepared several different ways, microwaving produced the greatest polyphenol losses, with meaningful degradation across thermal methods generally. So most everything in this dish with pigment stays raw and cold, with one thing that meets heat for half a minute and then gets stopped hard in ice.

Because the evidence on them is unusually good, and because I would rather share what evidence says rather than allude to it.

A double-blind randomized controlled trial in sixty-one healthy adults aged sixty-five to eighty found that daily wild blueberry powder providing 302 mg of anthocyanins, the equivalent of roughly 178 grams of fresh berries, improved vascular function and cognitive performance and lowered twenty-four-hour ambulatory systolic blood pressure over twelve weeks.

Now, to be clear, one hundred seventy-eight grams is about a cup and a half of fresh blueberries. Every day. For three months. That is a real commitment and considerably more than most people eat. Half a cup across four servings of this salad does not replicate a trial, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

What it does is put August and raw blueberries in front of you as a reminder, in a form you actually want to eat, on a day you were going to eat something anyway. A single salad is not an intervention; it is one of the thirty or so different plants worth getting into a week.

The Science Behind Anti-Inflammatory Eating

In addition to the actions of making this meal, there are also the properties of the “ingredients” in this recipe. This Valentine’s Day, instead of reaching for the usual treats (which absolutely have their place, especially dark chocolate truffles), also consider a different kind of love language for yourself: nutrient-dense foods that reduce inflammation and support heart health.

Research published in Advances in Nutrition demonstrates that anthocyanins, the vibrant pigments found in radicchio and other purple-red vegetables, can regulate different signaling pathways involved in cardiovascular disease development (Wallace, 2011). These compounds aren’t just pretty; they’re powerful anti-inflammatory agents that protect your endothelial function and reduce oxidative stress.

Similarly, betalains, the ruby-red pigments in beets, offer remarkable cardiovascular benefits. A comprehensive review in Nutrients reported that betalains exhibit potent antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activities in vitro and in vivo, with potential protective effects against cardiovascular disease (Clifford et al., 2015). The study noted that beetroot supplementation has been shown to reduce blood pressure, preserve endothelial function, and attenuate inflammation.

References

Freeze some of the extra peaches for later for a sorbet.

Learning about Plant-Based Eating

Having the right resources to learn about plant-based vegan principles is important for everyone.

These books are among my tried-and-true favorites, ones I have repeatedly referred to over the years. Let me know if you pick any of them up and what you learn.

Review recent seasonal plant-based posts here!