Fuit Salad (no copyright)

A while back, I stumbled on a cooking blog that appeared to be very slickly laid out and well presented. Until I began reading.

I sort of have this un-spoken rule about not calling other bloggers "idiots", or "morons." It isn't nice, and most of the time it's a pointless activity. If you don't like a blog, move on and read something else. Correct? That said I have to tell this story, though I'm not going to identify the person, or provide links to the blog.

Posted everywhere on his precious cooking blog were ads to purchase this or that along with places where readers could donate money to him or purchase gifts. Brain trust apparently thought if he did some programming and made it difficult to print from his page, people would fork over money for his "copyrighted" recipes.

"Wow" I thought, "He must be a really talented and important chef." I mean, why else would you go to such great lengths to protect your copyrights? Curious, I clicked through and found recipes for brownies and one particularly horrendous looking fruit salad. I'm glad he copyrighted his work because I'm positive no one has ever thought of dumping tinned fruit into a bowl with multi-coloured mini-marshmallows. Dear God.

Of course when I stopped laughing I started to feel sort of sorry for the dumb schmuck. Not sorry enough to send him money, or even click on any of the many, many revenue generating ads on the page.

Of course, after that I've always snickered a bit when I've made a fruit salad. "Should we have marshmallows on it, you know, just to violate "Mr. Delusions of Grandeur's" precious copyright? By the way, if you're going to create that sort of abomination in a bowl, you could at least make your own marshmallows-it isn't difficult to do.

My husband, that wonderful man whose sense of humour gives me a reason to get up each morning, suggested we send an email informing him:

"Me and some buddies from MIT are gonna screw you out of your fruit salad copyright. You see, we're SUPER geniuses, and we've figured out a way to get around your printer-scrambling software…it's called a PENCIL AND PAPER. And (evil laugh) hahaha…you can't stop us! I'm tossing mini marshmallows on tinned peaches RIGHT NOW!"

Anyway, I think having a recipe for a fruit salad is sort of nutty in the first place. What I've done is tossed together the ends of what was in the fridge and tossed it with a tin of mandarin oranges. Apricots, strawberries, blueberries. You get the idea.

Feel free to print anything you like, steal my photographs, or whatever. But please, no fruit flavoured mini-marshmallows in the fruit salad, OK?