I love interesting salads. I get tired of salads that are made with lettuce as a base – at salad bars the lettuce is usually cut too big to fit in your mouth and it takes forever to chew them. This is a colorful and very flavorful salad – great to bring to a raw potluck or serve your cooked friends and family. Pecans or walnuts can be used, but the raw pistachios flavor really fits this combination of flavors. If you don’t have access to green papaya, you may use jicama, zucchini (soak zucchini the same as papaya), or experiment with hard squashes like butternut or carnival or for a more tart version use a Granny Smith apple as the base.  (Full recipe on recipe page.)

My papaya tree is full of papaya that have yet to ripen. But the temps have been falling and I think I’ve got all the fruit I’ll get from it this season. Then this week we had snow and a hard freeze and so in preparation I covered some of my more tropical plants with plant blankets. I cut 3 of the largest green papaya from the tree to see if they would ripen indoors.

I really don’t think they were old enough to ripen indoors so I thought I’d see what I could make with the green papaya. There are other fruits that have “2 lives.” Green mangos are used as a relish and in salsas. Green plantain are used to make several cooked side dishes (patacones, chips…).  

When you cut a green papaya it has a sticky sap that oozes and when dry it is waxy. (The papayas that were left on the tree were covered in dots of the waxy substance the next morning after the freeze.) I cut open the papaya, cut off the peeling, used a mandoline to make a pile of julianne strips. I soaked the strips in a bowl of water, salt and juice of one lime.

Soak for at least 30 minutes. Drain and then toss with sliced purple cabbage, julianned cucumber, chopped or julianned apple, chopped cilantro, chopped pistachios and orange zest. Drizzle cranberry dressing over the salad and top with a couple of sliced soaked dates per serving.

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