The Best Fruit Salad Ever

I recently offered to bring a fruit salad for a get-together. But I didn't want to bring just any fruit salad. Cut up pieces of melon and strawberries are boring. So I looked for ways to jazz it up and found this recipe on Pioneer Woman. Seriously, this is the best fruit salad I've ever eaten and I am totally addicted. It may not be the healthiest fruit salad but it is dee-licious. It's all about the syrup - a simple sugar water infused with orange zest and vanilla bean. It is soooo addictive! Fresh mint leaves also kick it up a notch (Note: I liked chopping up the mint leaves but Kaitlyn didn't. With kids it's probably better to use whole mint leaves to get the flavor and then pick them out if you need to). Finally, the halved grapes. Maybe it's the extra juices and softer textures but halved grapes taste so much better than whole grapes.

I may have cooked the sugar water for too long because I ended up with a super thick syrup, almost like honey. I think it was supposed to be more watery. Anyway, I had way more than I needed and ended up only drizzling about two spoonfuls of the syrup over the fruit, but that was enough to provide plenty of coverage and a nice glaze.

Like the recipe calls for, I used grapes, strawberries, and blueberries. But this can be made with any fruit - in fact I had a ton of leftover syrup so all week I've been cutting up random pieces of fruit and tossing them together. It always tastes good and I've never had so much fruit salad in my life!