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My Phish-inspired title is perfect for this blog about a quick, healthy, yet filling salad which my friend Jesse Hanus recently shared on Facebook. With the start of a new job this week 
comes the need to get even more creative about healthy, quick, blog-able meals. This recipe fits that criteria, and is right in line with my mantra, “you are what you eat.” The salad simply consists of avocado, cashews, Wegmans Mango Vinegar Spritzer and mangoes. Turns out, I had almost all the ingredients in my fridge to make it, save the mangoes.
I’ve actually had a real issue with finding mangoes lately. It wasn’t even until recently that I developed a liking for the tropical fruit. And now that I have, I’m finding it’s difficult to find them at just the right ripeness. The mangoes from Price Right took so long to ripen I forgot about them, and the ones I bought at the market were overly-ripe and awful tasting. I finally just picked some up at Wegmans that made the grade.
The reality is mangoes aren’t in season right now, so I really shouldn’t be complaining. It makes me feel guilty knowing how much gasoline went into getting me the perfect mango in the middle of February, but that’s a topic for another blog.
If that isn’t simple enough, here’s some step-by-step instructions, seeing as though this is a food blog:
Base your proportions on how many people you’re feeding. If you’re going to eat this immediately, you can put the mangoes, avocados, cashews and spinach in a large bowl, spray it with the spritzer, and toss it until the flavor is to your liking.
If you’re going to bring this for lunch, you can cut up the mangoes ahead of time and store them in an airtight container. Trust me, you don’t want to have to wrestle with the mango at work.
You will want to cut the avocado when you’re ready to eat to prevent it from turning brown. If you don’t have a place to prepare lunch at work, you can watch this video to see my approach to dicing an avocado 
and packing it to-go. Excuse the poor quality of the avocado. I couldn’t get the pit out of it as neatly as I would have liked. The point of the video is that keeping the pit in the avocado will prevent it from going bad for at least a day. And when you’re ready to put it in your salad, you can just use a spoon to scoop out your pre-diced avocado.
Diariesofafoodie is equal parts journalist and line chef, a dash of public relations, topped with a passion for keeping you inspired in the kitchen. Author Amy Cavalier has been living, eating and writing in Rochester, New York since 2003.
