This is a salad I thought up while I was briefly on a low-carb diet. I lasted 5 days total on it and it was torture the whole time. Fruit is one of my favorite foods and I wasn’t even supposed to have an apple. The fifth day the whole thing just struck me as ridiculous and I defiantly ate an apple. That was the end of that. I hate diets. Just thinking about dieting makes me start to obsess over food.

Here’s what you need to make this.
1 lb. frozen cooked shrimp, thawed (large, extra large, jumbo, basically whatever you can get your hands on) Trader Joes’s frozen shrimp is tasty.
1 avocado

Fresh (it makes all the difference) mozzarella, either get the little balls or just cut up a large one into cubes.

Tomatoes, cherry or otherwise, once again whatever is tastiest.

Cucumbers, cubed or sliced

A handful of cilantro, chopped

If you wanted, you could put in a little chopped chives, or a sweet onion

Fresh lime juice, about 1/4 cup

Olive oil
Make a vinagrette with the lime juice and olive oil. Drizzle about 1/2 cup olive oil into the lime juice as you whisk it into an emulsion. You need to use some kind of sweetener to balance out the acid. I used a bit of the aforementioned herbal sugar syrup, maybe a half tablespoon. You could use honey or a fine sugar.

Put the shrimp, avo, mozz and cilantro into a bowl and pour the dressing over. Toss gently and serve. Improvise with this. Use a different cheese, (I recently had a smoked ricotta salata that would be superb in this). Or mess with the vinagrette. Use lemons, or orange juice or some other combo you think up. I really love cilantro in this but you may prefer parsley or fennel pollen or your favorite herb. Enjoy.

I wish I’d taken a picture of this we dug into it. It was so purty. But at least you get to see how flaky the crust was. It was my best crust ever. The reason? Lard, baby, lard. I usually use a fantastic, easy to use, all butter pate brisee recipe. I thought I was running low on butter and remembered I still had some lard in the fridge. I plan on using 1/2 lard, 1/2 butter from now on. This may sound arrogant, but I’ve never liked crust until I started making my own pies and tarts. Now I realize that it was probably because the crusts I had eaten previously weren’t so great.

I’m fortunate to have a wonderful butcher in my area, Sparrow Meat in Kerrytown. That’s where I got the beautifully pure, lucious lard of my dreams. See if you have a butcher in your area where you can obtain some good lard and then use this recipe for your next crust.

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1/4 c. lard

1/4 c. butter

1 tsp. salt

Approx. 6 tbs. of ice cold water

Blend the dry ingredients. Cut in the lard and butter til you have pea sized lumps. Add the water and blend til the dough comes together. The less you handle the dough, the better. Roll it out and use it as you will. This freezes very well and I usually make a double batch and freeze half for future use.

The filling was also delicious. Sam brought home some Traverse City cherries that were good but needed a little goosing for flavor. My darling pitted the cherries for me with my tiny little olive/cherry pitter I bought years ago. I really need to get one of those pitters that handles a bunch of cherries at once. I put the cherries in a bowl (it was probably about a pound, more or less) and added a half cup of sugar and 2 tbls. of cornstarch to thicken up the juices a bit. Then it struck me that lavender would probably complement the cherries very well. So I went outside, cut off a couple of stalks, and stripped the unopened buds. I stirred it all up and let it sit, while I took care of the crust.

I knew I didn’t have enough pastry for a double crust pie, so I decided to roll it out and then lay it over the pie pan as I would for a regular pie. I poured the filling in and then simply gathered the excess crust and gently folded it around the filling, leaving about a 3 inch opening. I was too lazy to brush some cream to give it a nicely browned crust (It was in the downstairs fridge. Lazy, I tell you. Hey, at least I’m making the damn thing) Instead, I sprinkled some turbinado sugar. I had the oven quite hot for the the first 15 min. (425 d.) and then lowered it to 350 for another 30 min. My oven is a convection, so it’s about 25 % faster than a regular oven.

To tell the truth, I think lavender goes with pretty much any type of fruit. So give it try with any good fruit you have. I particularly love it with blueberries.