shrimp-mango salad

Not keto at all, but tasty: I made myself a cool, summery shrimp-mango salad with chopped lettuce, cucumbers, and tomatoes. La voici:

shrimp-mango salad with dressing off to the side

The tomatoes and mangoes had a lot of juice, so the salad was a bit runny on the bottom, but it still tasted good. I'd never actually handled mangoes in their fruit form before (my coworker looked at me funny when I told him that); turns out that a ripe mango is super-juicy and super-slippery. Took me a bit to figure out how to break it down. One bizarre thing I noticed was that you can insert a finger under the skin, then peel the entire skin off in one fell swoop as if you were breaking down a squid. I was reminded of this because I'd just finished watching a bunch of Pohang fish-market videos of workers breaking down octopi, squid, and cuttlefish. Once the skin is off, though, you need to figure out how to hold the fruit so you can cut it into manageable pieces. I belatedly watched a few YouTube videos on how to break a mango down, and none of them shows a satisfactory, foolproof method. Ripe mangoes are slippery—period—and you're never going to be able to extract all of the flesh no matter which vaunted method you use to break the fruit down.

Anyway, if I make this salad again, I'll allow the mangoes to drain, and I'll cut the snotty/seedy centers out of the tomatoes I use to minimize runniness. Aside from that, though, the salad was a winner. It could have used some avocado, though (and there's another slippery fruit, but at least with a ripe avocado, you can extract almost all of the flesh pretty easily.

Attempting to evoke a salad I'd eaten on a TGV in France years ago, I made a dressing that was a honey-mustard mix done up the Korean way, i.e., with honey, mustard, and mayonnaise. I also added some black pepper and Old Bay seasoning. I was initially worried that the Old Bay would clash with the sugary honey and mango, but no: it paired nicely with the shrimp and wasn't a problem. The result was smooth and sweet with a hint of spiciness.

Oh, yeah: mango pits are weird. They remind me of the insole for a baby's shoe, at least in terms of their shape. Otherwise, they're as hard as the stone of a peach or nectarine.