Cucumber-Starfruit Salad

Tonight I wanted to use up the starfruit that have been ripening all week. Starfruit, or carambola, is a tropical fruit that has a very thin rind and peculiar shape. It can be sweet or tart, depending on how ripe it is. I like to wait until there is a bit of brown on their edges. At that stage they are as sweet as cantaloupe, but are slightly crunchy. Starfuit can be eaten on its own, on cereal or yogurt, in whipped cream for dessert, or in salads. They cost about 50 cents each when they are in season. I decided to use the starfruit in a salad by pairing it with cucumber.

There isn't much prep for starfruit. You just slice them up! There are seeds in them, but they are usually soft, like cucumber seeds. After slicing them up, you can see how they got their name. I sliced each star into a few pieces and tossed them with cucumber cubes. To bind the flavors together, I drizzled on olive oil and added a sprinkle of salt and a squirt of lemon juice. Every bite of this salad is full of flavor and cool juices. It is a great summer salad. I still have two more starfruit that I didn't cut up. Tomorrow night, they going into a fruit salad with fresh mango and orange segments.

I made hamburgers to go with tonight's starfruit salad. Hamburgers only take about ten minutes to shape and cook on the stove, which is much cooler and more convenient than prepping the barbeque. I had some bread dough in the fridge, so I shaped some hamburger buns and cooked them at 375 degrees for about twenty minutes. It was my first experiment with baking my own hamburger buns. I probably should have made them a bit flatter, but they tasted great.