©2009 Ashy's vegetarian recipes©2009 Ashy's vegetarian recipesI invented this myself. We had been traveling for a few months through Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Thailand and had encountered pineapple salads of various kinds along the way. They were mostly hot and spicy. I usually think about the kind of food I'm seeing and tasting as I travel - I say seeing, because sometimes it's got meat in it and I don't eat it, but I do think about how I could adapt the recipe, or combine it with another idea. I don't obsess about such things. I spend a lot of time not thinking about food, recipes and cooking too, but in so far as I would say I often think about recipes while traveling, I would also add that on this journey I had pineapple salad on my mind.
I don't know where the idea to add toasted coconut came from. But it's a good one. It just kind of dropped out of the ether, into my head one evening and I jotted it down in my wee note book. I had never tried roasting coconut but I figured it would work in the same way that I roast other nuts and seeds and it did. You just need to heat a pan and swirl desiccated coconut around in it for a minute. It browns fast so you have to keep your eye on it. It just needs to be a light golden colour, if it's dark brown, you've burned it.
SO, here's my recipe. You can add as many chillies as you want. I make it really hot so that it sears the mouth. I like it that way, and since it's probably going be a side dish which gets mixed in with rice and dhal and stuff, you can probably afford to put in more chilli than you normally would add to a dish. If you don't have fresh green chillies, just use dried red ones, or even chilli powder.
A couple of cups of fresh chopped pineapple (or about half a can of pineapple chunks)
A small onion
A few hot green chillies
About two tablespoons of roasted desiccated coconut
A firm tomato
Juice of a small lime
Salt
Chop the onion finely. Cu the tomato in half and remove the seeds then chop it up. Slice the chillies very finely. Mix all the ingredients together and there you have your pineapple salad.
I would suggest serving as an accompaniment to rice and a couple of Indian-style spiced dishes ( check out this page for some ideas).