The holiday season is here.  Cue the food!

Let’s face facts.  The colder months can be great inspiration for some delicious dishes, but they can also be a shortcut to a pie-and-gravy-strewn path of personal destruction.  Specifically, the chill and the short days somehow inspire carbohydrate hoarding, at least for some of us.  (I speak from a purely observational perspective, of course.  You’d be surprised how much you can see from behind the delicious fort of bread I’ve built.) While carbs–especially those slathered in butter–taste great, I always find that a heavy rotation of too many bready or sweet items makes me tired and kind of cranky.  Nobody likes that.

Still, it is a good time to enjoy delicious food, particularly when you can share it with friends and family.  Over the next few weeks, I will be posting some holiday-themed recipes you can use for the myriad shindigs and goings-on that inevitably pop up this time of year.  Some of these recipes will be meant to balance the richer fare found at holiday dinners, while others will be more self-indulgent.  I hope you enjoy them all.

First up is a salad inspired by one my friend Rachel mentioned when I was in Philadelphia.  Apparently, her aunt used to toss melon and pomegranate seeds together into a lovely and delicious treat, one Rachel describes with considerable enthusiasm years later. I decided to see if I could dress up this recipe into something gala-worthy, seeing as how I had gotten a canary melon from our farm CSA last week and some pomegranates from the nearby farmers’ market.  Pomegranates are everywhere here this time of year, growing fat and red and nigh-to-bursting on the neighbors’ trees.  (Pomegranates are, in fact, classified as an exploding fruit, one that bursts to release its seeds.) It’s a good time of year to make friends and beg for fruit.

Anyhow, the cooking gods smiled on me; my experiment turned out to be both tasty and beautiful to look at.  I am confident your guests will be über-impressed by the splash of color on the dinner table.

Everyone, meet the Pomegranate Sunset Salad.

Salad, meet the blogosphere.

This fruit salad can be a side dish, a breakfast treat for overnight out-of-towners, or a light dessert option at a family gathering.  Any way you slice it (ha!), it is likely to be a hit.  Best of all, outside of the pomegranate separation, it’s a snap to make.

Need some help figuring out how to get those seeds out of that pomegranate?  Try this advice from a farmers’ market vendor, or try this tip from Simply Recipes.  Once you get the hang of it, it’s not too bad.  Plus, you’ll be amazed at how many seeds you can get out of a pomegranate.  Also of interest, I’ve noticed that a lot of kids think getting pomegranate seeds out is really fun, especially if you make a big deal about how much like alien egg sacs they are.  Slice up the pomegranate for them, hand them a bowl of water, show them how it’s done and get them involved in the kitchen festivities.  If you want the little sprouts in your family to grow up being able to feed themselves and understand what goes into a healthy meal, it’s important for them to feel welcome and comfortable in the kitchen from early on.  Plus, they love the bragging rights they get when everyone oohs and aahs over the pomegranate salad and they get to say, “I made that!”

Besides, when it’s all said and done, sprout-and-grown-up bonding over alien egg sacs is really what the holidays are all about.