Spicy Fruit Salsa Brunoise

I needed to practice my brunoise skills since they were getting kinda rusty.

Ha! Really, I have never brunoised properly before, but since I just learned the basics of how to do it, I amuse myself by dropping brewn-nwah' into conversation. And I like the tiny-perfect-squares result, too. So even though my try is with fruit, not veg, and my squares are still a little clunky, it made for a very uniform (and eventually spicy) fruit salad.

We'd recently picked up a pale green and purple-striped pepino melon from the big international section of the remodeled Kroger at Poplar and Kirby. (Everyone kept raving about this place; it really is neat.) I had been thinking about using the pepino as a starting point and had to come up with something to build around it.

The melon took a while to ripen, so that was brunoised along with strawberries and English cucumber. Tara's really, really spicy fruit salad (with jalapenos!) from last summer was on my mind, too. For this, though, I added a couple of tiny pinches of cayenne, plus agave nectar and a squeeze of lemon to round the salsa out. We had it with salty tortilla chips for a nice contrast, but I think it could be a good spring dessert, too.