Lazy Summer Cottage Cheese & Fruit Salad

As anyone who has lived through the middle of a southwestern Ontario summer knows, there are days so hot and humid that cooking a dinner is simply unthinkable and even eating ought to be kept to a minimum of work. Of course, you can always order out for a pre-prepared meal, but if you're like me and you like to know exactly what you're getting in your food, you can try out this very simple and light, cool and refreshing solution that I've been using for years now — a no-cook cottage cheese and fruit salad. It's not only a delicious and colorful way to incorporate much-needed vitamins, proteins and fats into a meal without over-exercising your digestive system, but the middle of summer here in Ontario is such an amazing opportunity to load up on fresh local fruits like berries, plums, peaches, apricots and melons that it would be a shame not to take every conceivable advantage of it.

In this summer weekend's edition I've tossed in some green grapes, kiwi fruit, strawberries and a diced apple to go along with some local blueberries, apricots and black cherries that I found at the market, but needless to say any medley of your favorite fresh fruits can be used satisfy your own desires.

In fact, there are no rules for a summertime cottage cheese and fruit salad except one — use a dry, pressed cottage cheese for the flavor, instead of the typical and much blander curds and liquid variety found in tubs, and most importantly make sure to find cottage cheese with a high milk fat content, like this 10% milk fat product sold by Western Creamery. Not only are fats essential carriers for fat-soluble vitamins, but low-fat milk products almost always come from poor-quality high-production cattle herds bred to deliver massive quantities of milk — only by marketing low-fat milk as "healthy" can milk marketing boards dispose of their large yields at a high consumer margin. And, contrary to intuition, milk fat doesn't cause weight gain — low-fat milk products do!

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