Summer Fruit Bowl with Grain-free, Raw Granola

Happy Monday lovely readers! I hope that you’ve survived the recent heat wave traveling across the U.S. if you live in the states. We had a taste of it here in the Smokies the past couple of days but it’s finally back to our usual, heavenly temps today after a drenching rain last night. Yay! Happy garden weather…

This isn’t so much of a recipe as it is a wonderfully colorful batch of fruits that I just couldn’t resist sharing. I had no plan on posting this but after I put it together and looked at the vibrant colors and tasted it, I knew you’d want to make it!

It started off as just a fruit salad with lots of berries. In the summertime I gorge on berries. Get ’em while you can, is all I can say! Then I wanted to add some nuts and seeds so I pulsed some together and the result was a surprising “granola” without the oats. It was crunchy and super satisfying atop this stunning bowl of fresh fruits. Divine!

Ingredients:

Combination of fruits of your choice. I used lots of strawberries, blueberries, peaches, bananas and red grapes.

~ for the “granola”

1 cup raw pecans
½ cup raw sunflower seeds
¼ cup slivered almonds
¼ cup hemp seeds

Directions:

Slice the fruit and mix it up.
Pulse the pecans and the sunflower seeds in a food processor a few times to chop, then mix with the almonds and hemp seeds.
You could spread the pecans and the sunflower seeds out on a baking dish and toast them a bit before mixing with the other seeds if you like a toasty flavor. I preferred to leave them raw.
Top the fruit with the granola and add some plant-based milk. I used homemade cashew milk. Yum!