Recipe of the week: 5 cup salad + frugal tip: use what you have!

A family get together was coming up and I was asked to bring a fruit salad. I started dreaming up the fresh fruit ingredients I could buy and put together with a yummy whipped cream and so on. Then I realized that I already had everything I needed to make a fruit salad.

A couple of weeks ago, I got some incredible deals on sour cream and on marshmallows. I always have coconut on hand, because of my homemade granola addiction. I also always buy mandarin oranges and pineapple at case lot sales for recipes that I love the make. (I use the mandarin oranges for smoothies and the pineapple for a mandarin chicken recipe.)

Those are the 5 ingredients needed for 5 cup salad!

This is so easy to make, it's just 1 cup of each ingredient. (I must ask: is it weird to put marshmallows in a fruit salad? Considering where I live and grew up, I'm thinking it's pretty standard. I must ask this because I have a grandmother that regularly put chocolate chips in her fruit salads and then upgraded later and started putting chopped Snickers bars in instead.)

So, to review:
1 cup crushed or tidbit pineapple
1 cup mandarin oranges
1 cup coconut
1 cup marshmallows
1 cup sour cream

The easiest and, for me, the most frugal fruit salad I could make! Here is my daughter mixing it up. (It actually disappeared pretty quickly at the family party!)