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- I have a feeling that this mango avocado shrimp salad is going to be a Downshifter favorite. It's light and fresh for spring and summer, and combines two ingredients that I personally love, which is the mango and avocado, and a quick cooking protein, which is the shrimp. And for a little extra color and crunch, I've also tossed in some sweet bell pepper and celery. This salad is sweet, crunchy, and filling, and it's tossed in a really easy honey lime dressing to finish it off. Now depending on how quickly you can slice and dice a few fruits and veggies, you could have this salad done in about 15 to 20 minutes.
And then you could spend the rest of the day enjoying it out on your patio or in your backyard under the sun. All right, let's dive in. To get started, you'll need one pound of raw shrimp. I recommend getting smaller shrimp in the 40 to 60 count range so that everything stays bite sized in the salad. If you can only find large or jumbo shrimp, you can then slice them up like I do on my cucumber shrimp salad, and I'll show a photo of that at the end. To cook the shrimp, bring a pot of water to a boil, add the shrimp and cook them for about two to three minutes, or until they're cooked through in pink.
You don't wanna overcook shrimp, or they might go a bit rubbery. Once the shrimp are done, use a skimmer to remove them from the pot and transfer them to an ice water bath. Once they're fully cooled, which should take about three minutes or so, you can drain them in a colander in the sink. To prepare the other ingredients for the salad, you'll dice up two mangoes. Mangoes are one of my favorite summertime fruits, and I just love their juicy sweetness. There are numerous ways to peel and slice mangoes, and it seems everyone has their preferred method.
What I usually do is slice both cheeks off, away from the pit, then use a large spoon, to scoop out the flesh, similar to how I often do it with avocado. And don't forget the flesh that's around the pit as well, you don't wanna waste any of this sweet mango goodness. And once you've got both mangoes all diced up, add them to a large mixing bowl. While I often grab jumble avocados for other recipes, I do recommend grabbing just regular or smaller avocados for this salad. Otherwise, your avocado to mango ratio might be a bit more skewed to the avocado side. And if you can try to grab ones that are ripe, but a bit firmer so that they don't turn to mush when you stir the salad together.
And I don't know how you all slice an avocado, but I'll lay halves flat and slice them lengthwise, then flip the quarters on their side and slice lengthwise again, then slice across for a small dice. This is also a bit safer than holding an avocado half in my hand and using a knife to score it, then scoop it out with a large spoon, which I've also been known to do when I'm dicing up half of an avocado just for me. But once that's done, add the avocado to the bowl. When I was testing this salad, I thought it needed some crunch and color, and you guys know I love bell peppers, so I decided to add one in. Of course, you can use any color bell pepper,
they'll all work just fine, but the red is a nice contrast to the other colors in the salad. And remember that more color equals more nutrients as well, which is always a good thing. And once you've got that bell pepper all diced up, add it to the bowl. At this point, I saw that all of the ice had melted in the colander, so I'll transfer the shrimp to the mixing bowl. For a bit more added crunch, slice and dice two ribs of celery. I feel like celery is such an underappreciated ingredient in salads but it really does add great flavor and an overall freshness plus that lovely crunch.
Next add a quarter cup of diced red onion, if you don't have red onion on hand, you could always add sliced green onions or even diced shallot. I'm dicing up half of a red onion today, which is definitely more than a quarter cup. So I'll measure out how much I need and then save the rest to use in my scrambled eggs or some other recipes later this week. And lastly, add a quarter cup of roughly chopped cilantro for that bright herbal flavor. Cilantro is one of my favorite herbs to use in summertime recipes.
Alright, moving on to the very simple honey lime dressing for this salad. And I recommend squeezing fresh limes for the best flavor. Then add three tablespoons of olive oil to a small bowl along with two tablespoons of lime juice, one teaspoon of honey, one garlic clove that you can mince straight into the bowl and some kosher salt and ground black pepper to taste. Give that a stir port on top of the salad and then gently stir all of the salad ingredients together. (cheerful music)
I'll transfer the salad into a prettier bowl today as my mom is coming down to visit and she loves mango, avocado, and shrimp as much as I do. Now if you wanna get fancy, you can garnish or sprinkle a bit more cilantro on top before serving it up. This is the perfect warm weather summer salad, and I cannot wait to hear what you guys think of it, and I am certainly ready to dig into it myself. This salad just screams freshness, and summertime parties and entertaining so I'm gonna serve up myself a pretty big bowl of it.
All right, oops. And spill a little. Let's take a bite. So juicy and sweet naturally and I love the crunch. I don't know if you can hear from my microphone, the little bit of crunch as well from the sweet bell pepper and the celery. It's just such a good combination and that honey lime dressing is light. Now if you do like shrimp salads, I have several of them on my website, but two I'd say of the most popular other than what I know that this one will become, is my classic shrimp salad,
that's your deli style shrimp salad. and my cucumber shrimp salad and that has a creamier dressing, and that one is probably better for meal prep. This does have avocado so I would say that this one lasts for about a day but probably isn't the best for meal prep. The cucumber shrimp salad is best for meal prep, but this one, I mean it's got the mango and you can't resist the mango. I'll also say that I served this up recently for family and this whole entire bowl got devoured so quickly. Everyone went back for seconds and thirds, it's just really easy to enjoy.
I hope you guys enjoyed this mango avocado shrimp salad recipe and if you did, make sure to give it a thumbs up. And after you've made it, you can go over to my website and give it a five star review that always helps me a bunch. And with that, I will see you guys in the next video.
