Turkish Celery-Coconut Salad

I like to convert recipes into healthier versions of themselves. This one didn't take any conversion. I was browsing through my Turkish food cookbook, which is full of questionable ingredients, but is also full of amazing spice combinations and very wonderful ingredients as well. I made two modifications: the recipe called for the usual brown-shelled coconut meat and I replaced it with fresh young coconut. I also added some avocado, but you don' t have to if you want this to be a very low calorie salad. It would be a perfect summer breakfast, in my opinion.

1 bunch celery
2 fresh young coconuts (scroll down to the coconuts section) you can get these at Whole Foods.
1 lime - juice and 1 tsp zest
2 avocados

Wash the celery. Remove the tops and the base of the celery, and put it through the Cuisinart on the shred blade. Or chop it in very thin slices.

Poke a hole in each coconut with an awl or a phillips screwdriver hammered in with a mallet. Poke a hole on each side of the coconut and drain the water into a glass. DRINK IT while you make the recipe, because it's heavenly and delicious.

Use a cleaver (okay, it doesn't have to be a $200 one from William-Sonoma, it was just the first photo that came up on Teh Google) to pound each coconut in two pieces. You can do this by hammering the cleaver into the coconut with a mallet or if you have a really sharp cleaver I guess you can just do it with arm strength but that sounds like a recipe for cut-off fingers to me. My cleaver is a piece of crap, which is actually good because I don't feel bad about hammering it into the coconut with a mallet and it works really well. My kids know when I'm getting a coconut ready to eat. "There she goes again with the coconuts!" they say.

Dig out the meat with a spoon. Work the spoon in under the coconut meat backwards-- in other words, don't try to scoop it out like ice cream in a dish. Face the outward-rounded part of the spoon towards the inside of the coconut and it will pry the flesh away from the shell much more easily. If the coconut is not under-ripe (and therefore jellylike in consistency) I can get the whole thing out with one motion this way. Dont' worry if you can't, just dig out all that delicious coconut meat and cut it into strips.

Skin and cube the avocados.

Toss everything (celery, coconut, lime juice, lime zest, avocado) in a bowl together. I like to garnish it with Italian parsley, but cilantro would also work.

This is so crisp and clean tasting!