Winter Citrus Salad

I had a really stupid idea last week.  I was still feeling a little post-holiday jiggle.  And in an effort to tighten that up, I thought I wanted to do a cleanse.  But what cleanse to do?  The thought of drinking fruit/vegetable juices for 5 days straight makes me want to throw up.  And the thought of the drinking maple syrup/cayenne pepper/lemon juice for 5 days makes me want to cry.  I NEED TO CHEW STUFF!

So I chose the least awful of the awful cleanse options I could think of.  I chose to eat a raw food diet for a week.  Of course this also included no alcohol (read: torture).  But at least I could still go out to dinner with friends and watch them drink.  Cause that's always fun.

So it was, that 3 nights into eating lots of shaved vegetable salads, and way too much avocado, I went to dinner at one of my favorite restaurants with a friend.  It was italian restaurant, known for their handmade fresh pastas.  Needless to say, the moment I sat at the table and saw a truffle oil laden mushroom ravioli sitting on the table next to me, I almost broke out into desperate hives.

But as delusion is the mother of imagined happiness, I convinced myself that ordering the winter citrus salad would be a delicious, and equally satisfying option.  Uh...I could not have been more wrong.  The disappointing thing is that I would have actually ordered that dish if I wasn't on a cleanse.  I love citrus fruit...I love shallot vinaigrette...and I LOVE avocado.  But somehow this dish went horribly wrong in it's execution.  So days later, when I was still feeling hungry and pissy, and thinking about how thoroughly that dinner did not hit the spot, I felt the need to make it at home.  Just to make sure that I wasn't wrong about how delicious it could have been if they had just done it the right way. 

I thought about adding bacon, cause you know...pork fat makes everything better.  But that seemed like cheating.  (Not that I'm above cheating.)  (Also, I think I just put the last of my double-cut bacon in a slow cooker with some lentils.)  Fortunately, even with out the bacon, it was pretty good.  And just what I wanted on a Sunday afternoon to sit right next to my frittata and my mimosa which I was FINALLY allowed to have to celebrate my week of stupid cleansing.