Oh boy. We’ve been working up to this recipe all week and I’m so excited to share these tacos with you today!

These vegetarian tacos feature fried halloumi cheese (more on that in a minute), fresh pineapple salsa and aji verde (Peruvian green hot sauce).

It’s a cultural mishmash of components, but the end result was meant to be. Maybe we can call them Mexican(ish).

These sweet-and-spicy tacos are giving my favorite vegetarian tacos a run for their money. Which is fine with me, because tacos can do no wrong.

I propose that you invite some friends over this weekend and make tacos! You can prepare the salsa and sauce before your guests arrive. Ready?

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Looking for a fun, fresh party appetizer? This colorful pineapple salsa recipe will be a big hit. It’s a little sweet, a little spicy, and 100% delicious.

Perhaps pineapple salsa sounds crazy at first glance, but it’s not when you think about it. Tomatoes are technically fruit, too, and they’re also sweet in flavor. If you don’t believe me, I dare you to give this pineapple salsa a try!

I originally adapted this recipe from my mango salsa recipe, and shared it in my cookbook. In the book, I called this recipe “pineapple pico de gallo” because its texture is more similar to traditional pico de gallo.

Unlike my favorite red salsa, you’ll dice the ingredients instead of blitz them together in a food processor. In fact, the smaller you dice the ingredients, the better your salsa turns out.

I’ve been craving this pineapple salsa lately, so I thought I’d share it on the blog, too. Salsa for everyone!

Watch How to Make Fresh Pineapple Salsa

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Introducing the world’s most simple fruit salad recipe, with a tropical twist! It’s a refreshing salad starring ripe watermelon, pineapple and cantaloupe. (I know cantaloupe isn’t everyone’s favorite; feel free to substitute honeydew or your favorite tropical fruit.)

I encountered this fruit salad last December, when I kept my grandma Virginia company on her dream trip to Costa Rica. It was dreamy! Virginia is 86 years old and nothing slows her down. She flew over the jungle on zip lines with the zeal of Hermione Granger.

We found this fruit salad on an epic breakfast spread at Tabacon Thermal Resort. Fresh fruit is abundant in Costa Rica, but this fruit salad caught my attention because I loved how tiny they diced the fruit—even smaller than I managed for these photos. They served it in little shooters, which almost made it look like candy.

Usually, melon and pineapple are cut into fairly large chunks, right? Their salad taught me that if you cut them very small instead, you can appreciate the flavor of all three fruits in every bite.

Their fruit salad was refreshing, colorful, delightful and very simple—so simple that I hesitated to make it an official recipe here. But hey, it’s summertime and summer produce hardly needs any help. This salad would be perfect for your Fourth of July festivities!

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Are you craving sunshine and warm days like I am? Let’s divert our eyes from the cloudy weather and focus on these vibrant, refreshing açaí bowls instead. They’re like a tropical vacation in a bowl, minus the jet lag and sand in your pants. You can enjoy them in the morning before work!

I’ve been curious about açaí bowls for a while now, after seeing them pop up on my friends’ vacation feeds from trips to Southern California and Hawaii. Like always, I researched acai bowls to the end of the internet and played with my own acai bowl recipe until it was just right.

Since acai grows in the Amazon, it seemed natural to blend acai with tropical fruits. These smoothie bowls are simply and naturally sweetened with frozen banana, mango and pineapple. If you’ve been looking for a fun way to eat more fruit, this is it.

These vegan acai smoothie bowls are cold, creamy and almost sorbet-like in texture. In fact, the smoothie portion is so delightful that you could serve it as a light after-dinner treat. Or, load it up with crunchy granola, nuts or seeds, and fresh fruit, and you’ll have a nutritious and satisfying breakfast.

Bonus? Unlike most smoothies, this one keeps well in the refrigerator for several days.

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I’m still giggling about the time I shared a green smoothie on Snapchat, and one of my good friends told me it looked totally disgusting. That’s what good friends are for, right? I laughed because I was ninety percent confident that he would have loved it if he had tried it.

It was mostly made of raspberries, but I added some spinach for some extra nutrients. While the raspberry-red and spinach-green colors didn’t combine to produce the most appetizing shade of frozen treat, it was nutritious and seriously delicious.

I’ll never get on the expensive fresh juice bandwagon, but smoothies are a great way to get some extra servings of fruit (and even some greens). With smoothies, as opposed to juice, you get all that goodness without losing the fiber content, which keeps blood sugar levels more stable.

When I discovered that I could portion smoothie ingredients in a mason jar or bag to blend later, I started making a lot more smoothies at home. I’ve been rotating through the three make-ahead green smoothies in my book, but it’s about time to change things up.

I recently got a chance to chat with Jen from Simple Green Smoothies. She’s a pioneer of the green smoothie concept. Somehow, I’d never gotten my hands on a copy of her book of the same name, so she offered to send me a copy. It’s beautifully designed and photographed, with over 100 recipes for green smoothies of all varieties—green smoothies for beginners and kids, post-workout, dessert, and even green smoothie bowls.

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Summer is almost here! I can feel it. I’m downright giddy about the explosion of colorful summertime fruit at the farmers’ markets right now.

It seems serendipitous that the hottest season of the year would produce produce that hardly requires any help. I treat ripe strawberries like dessert; just rinse and eat.

One of my favorite ways to enjoy fresh fruit is in agua fresca form. Agua frescas are refreshing fruit drinks made simply of fruit blended with water, lime juice and a bit of sweetener.

Aguas frescas are popular in Mexico and Central America, although I ordered the most incredible pineapple agua fresca in Austin, Texas, earlier this year.

I’m not much of a juice drinker, but I love agua frescas because they can be served unfiltered. So, unlike regular juice, you’re sipping up all the fiber that is inherent in the fruit rather than filtering it out.

In theory, that means that they won’t cause quite the blood sugar spike that regular juices can. Plus, you can make it in a blender and skip the filtering step.

Watch How to Make Aguas frescas

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I haven’t done any real cooking in our Austin kitchen yet, but this homemade Thai pineapple dish is looking pretty tempting after all the tacos I ate yesterday! I’m determined to eat all the tacos in Austin.

Back to Thai food. This pineapple fried rice recipe was inspired by a meal at Sweet Basil in Norman, Oklahoma over the holidays. I really loved the combination of sweet, caramelized pineapple with Thai spices.

I can’t claim that my version is traditional, but it does taste very close to my memories of that dish. I used some leftover bell pepper instead of tomato and thought it was pretty great that way.

The cooking method for this fried rice is a riff on my spicy kale and coconut fried rice. If you’re a fan of that recipe, I think you’ll love this one, too, as well as my veggie fried rice and the coconut fried rice in my cookbook. Please let me know how it turns out for you in the comments!

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For what this pizza lacks in class, it makes up for in good taste. Wait, no, that doesn’t work. Let’s try again. This barbecue pizza is my much classier arugula pesto pizza’s spunky little sister. She rocks mini skirts and drinks bourbon and you just can’t help but love her.

This pizza reminds me of fun times working at a bar after college. The barbecue chicken pizza was a popular menu item so I soon discovered the joy of barbecue sauce on pizza. Its concentrated sweet and vinegary flavor plays nicely with bubbly cheese and sweet and spicy toppings. It’s so wrong and so right at the same time.

I got all nostalgic the other day when I came across a pineapple and jalapeño pizza. I thought those flavors deserved more representation on the blog than just tortilla pizzas, so! here we are with homemade barbecue pizzas.

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It’s about time I talked to you all about tortilla pizzas. I’ve been making these babies since elementary school when my mom would make something that my picky younger self refused to try. They are perfect for days when the thought of cooking a full-fledged meal is too much to bear and even lifting up the phone to order out seems too hard, or when you’re alone and downright hangry… like me on most days.

Honestly, I haven’t ordered pizza for myself in years because tortillas are always on call. Greasy, cheesy delivery pizza beckons from afar, but tortillas shout from my fridge, “Hey, I cost less! I’m better for you! And I’m already here!” The concept of the tortilla pizza itself is so simple, but there are a few tricks to getting a perfectly crispy, flaky crust and bubbly cheese, so be sure to read the recipe below for my time-proven method for perfect tortilla pizzas.

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Thanks to yesterday’s big news, I’m in quite a celebratory mood today. What better way to celebrate my Saveur nomination for “best cooking blog” than with a cold pineapple cocktail! Clinks all around, friends. I still can’t believe it.

This little number is not for the faint of heart; it’s bold, spicy, sweet and herbal all at once. The sweetness of the pineapple juice and cooling effect of cilantro diffuse the spiciness of the serrano so it doesn’t overwhelm the palate. This cocktail is a treat, so sip slowly and savor it like it costs ten dollars.

I originally intended to get fancy and make some more serrano-infused tequila for this post. Serranos are so high up the Scoville scale that serrano-infused tequila only requires twenty to thirty minutes worth of seeping time. However, I’m always one for instant gratification (especially when I’m thirsty), and I figured out that you can simply muddle a small slice of serrano pepper instead. Cheers to that!

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