Strange But Good Salad

When I went to a cooking class with my mom a few months ago, the chef made a Pineapple Seafood Salad. It looked amazing, but I'm allergic to pineapple, so I didn't taste it. I asked him if there is any good substitution for pineapple, and he suggested using mango and avocado. Seeing as mangoes and avocados were on sale last week, I decided to try this out.

The original recipe was created for shoppers at Central Market, meaning that they intended you to buy certain convenience items for making this, such as a container of diced celery. Obviously, this made amounts a mystery to me, so I sort of made things up as I went along. So, what you have here is a recipe based off of the original, but I'll actually tell you how much of things I used.

3 mangoes, diced
3 avocados, diced
3 stalks of celery, diced
2 cups of cooked, peeled shrimp
1/4 cup mint, chopped
1 bunch green onion, sliced thin
2 tsp. Tabasco
Juice of 2 limes

Toss all ingredients together. Taste and adjust seasonings to your liking. You can add salt if you want, but I didn't. I liked it as is.

I call this a strange, but good salad because the ingredients are a rather odd combination. You should have seen my husband's face when I served this, especially when I told him what all was in it. Very, very wary. I could tell he was convinced it was going to be disgusting, but he wound up loving it. Somehow, all those ingredients work together to make something delicious.

Oh, I should mention that the original recipe called for 3/4 cup shredded coconut. I love coconut, but my husband hates it, so I left it out. I'm sure it would have been amazing with it in there. It was also meant to have 1 cup of shrimp and 1 cup of scallops, but again, my husband doesn't like scallops, so I left them out and doubled the shrimp. The picture of the salad was from the next day. It doesn't look as pretty as when it was freshly made, but I think it tasted a tad better because the flavors had melded together a bit more.