Forget chicken soup, try pineapple

Normally when I feel a cold coming on, I crave chicken soup or hot tea. But this time around, I found myself craving pineapple.

It’s possible that I have pineapple on the brain simply because it has turned up in a couple of fruit salads I’ve enjoyed recently. But I do find that this juicy fruit is a nice antidote to the dry air of midwinter, in addition to having buckets of vitamin C — one cup provides about 40 percent of your daily recommended dose.

Even if you don’t feel like you’re getting sick, pineapple is still worth eating. In addition to being full of nice hydrating juices, it’s low in fat and calories (surprising, when you think about how sweet it is).

It’s high in fiber, which means it’s good for your digestive system. Oddly, even though they have a lot of fiber, pineapples are considered among the top five fruits in terms of being intestine friendly, because they have a high glucose-to-fructose ratio, so they don’t create a lot of gas in your tummy.

All that vitamin C also means pineapple is full of antioxidants, so this is a fruit that doesn’t just fight colds, it also fights cancer.

And it is exceptionally well-endowed with manganese, which is one of those minerals you don’t know you need, but you do. You don’t have to get a lot of it, but you do need some, and pineapple is an easy way to get it.

Manganese doesn’t, strictly speaking, “do� anything in your body on its own. But it acts as a catalyst, and gets other nutrients working together (kind of like a really good hostess at a cocktail party).

Manganese helps build strong bones, and helps metabolize carbohydrates and proteins. It is also believed to help your body produce sex hormones, such as estrogen and testosterone.

In my mind, pineapple isn’t really an ingredient, at least not for cooked foods. It’s usually an ingredient in fruit salad. In fact, I usually just pick out the pineapple chunks from the serving bowl and eat them, and maybe some honeydew melon, if it’s ripe and sweet; if you’ve ever shared a fruit salad with me, I apologize for this boorish behavior.

But of course there are many foods that are enhanced and improved when pineapple chunks are added in the cooking process, such as sweet and sour anything and the famous pineapple upside down cake.

On those rare occasions when I buy a whole pineapple (instead of pre-cut chunks) and I have to get creative to use up all that fruit (no such thing as a small pineapple), I like to add small pieces to chicken salad.

I took this idea from the Coffee Shop restaurant at Union Square in Manhattan. They used to serve a chicken salad burrito called the Sonia Braga that had mango and cashews and red onion in it, really delicious.

I don’t have a real recipe for this, and I hesitate to lead you astray by making one up. But here we go.

In a nutshell, here’s what you can do: take cold cooked chicken, say two cups’ worth. Add 1/8 cup each of chopped shallots or finely chopped red onion, pineapple, cashews and celery (obviously, you can adapt the amounts depending on what you like and what you have on hand).

Add some garlic or a pinch of curry powder if you feel adventurous.

Dress the salad with a dollop or two of mayonnaise and season it with salt and pepper to taste (some smoked salt is nice here).

Mix it up and serve it on thick slices of artisanal white bread, or tightly wrapped in a (preferably warm) flour tortilla. Add lettuce, if you like.

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