You don’t need to be on a tropical holiday island to enjoy these colourful salads. Just drop into your local fishmonger and pick up market fresh shellfish, then stop at your greengrocer for the best local produce and create your own piece of edible paradise at home. Perfect to share with family and friends during these school holidays. 

For this sweet and succulent prawn, avocado and nectarine salad, you will need to select medium sized cooked prawns, about the length of your index finger. I used Whitsunday wild tiger prawns with a bright orange and cream striped shell. For this recipe the prawns need to be shelled and cleaned prior to use. It is essential to remove the thin intestine that runs along the back of each prawn. Leaving the intestines in the prawn, results in a bitter taste and gritty texture. Very unpleasant! You can either pull the intestine out from the top with your fingers, or carefully slice along the back which exposes the dark line of the intestine and wash it out under cold running water. Pat the prawns dry with paper towel before adding to the salad. 

Prawn, Avocado and Nectarine Salad to serve 6 people as a side dish or 4 as a decent entree. 

1kg cooked tiger prawns
2 avocados
2 yellow fleshed firm nectarines
handful of coriander leaves (not the stems)
2 tablespoons whole egg mayonnaise
1 small clove of garlic, grated
juice of half a lemon
sea salt and black pepper to taste

Peel and clean the prawns and place in a glass or ceramic bowl in the fridge. Swat away any small hands desperate to try a prawn in advance. 

Slice the avocado into long finger width lengths and each nectarine into 12 slices. Arrange half the avocado and nectarine slices neatly in a large shallow bowl or platter. 

Scatter over half the prawns, then add the remaining avocado and nectarine slices and finish with more prawns. 

In a cup, mix together the mayonnaise, garlic and lemon juice, season to taste. Dollop teaspoonfuls over the entire salad.

Sprinkle over the coriander leaves and serve immediately. If you are planning on serving this dish later in the evening, squeeze some additional lemon juice over the sliced avocado to prevent it from turning brown and refrigerate the finished salad until ready to eat. 

The gorgeous garden salad pictured above, teams up alongside the prawn number as an easy side dish to local fish, in this case soft coral trout panfried in salted butter. and olive oil. For the carnivores, you can accompany the garden and prawn salads with a juicy barbecued steak, which in effect turns the entire meal into an elegant and easy version of “surf and turf”. 

Local Coral Trout panfried in butter and olive oil
partnered perfectly with the garden salad
in the background. 


Choose sweet, ripe and rosy red vine-ripened tomatoes, firm Lebanese cucumbers and crunchy baby cos lettuce. Use a robust, tasty olive oil combined with fresh lemon juice, salt and pepper to really enhance the flavour of the raw ingredients. I cushioned a bottle of Lomondo olive oil in between my clothes in the small suitcase that has accompanied me to Hamilton Island, and have loved drizzling this over our family salads and pasta dishes. I’ve recently discovered this brand and can’t get enough of it! www.lomondo.com.au 

Holiday Garden Salad

For my family of 8, I used the following quantities of ingredients. You may halve, quarter or otherwise depending on the number of people around your table.

2 baby cos lettuce sliced into thick ribbons
3 vine ripened tomatoes sliced into eighths
3 Lebanese cucumbers sliced into 1cm rounds
half a Spanish onion sliced into paper thin slivers
1 red capsicum, seeds removed, sliced into thin lengths
1/2 teaspoon dried Italian herbs
Juice of 1 small lemon
3 tablespoons Lomondo olive oil 
sea salt and black pepper to taste

Arrange all the vegetable salad ingredients in a large bowl or platter, roughly alternating the vegetables so there is a good mixture of variety and colour. 

Combine the dressing ingredients in a jar and shake together to combine. Drizzle over the salad and serve. 

Food always seems to taste so much better when on holidays!