David R. MacIver's Blog
Guacamole and playing with new toys
Gosh? Is this thing still here? I suppose I’d better post something
to it then. :-)
I’ve been lacking the energy to play recently, but some new kitchen toys
and a renewed attempt at acquiring the energy may result in more posts
in the near future.
Yesterday I had a problem. Two problems in fact.
1) My kitchen was resplendent with several exciting new sharp implements
(Remember: A well armed kitchen is a polite kitchen) which were not
being used. Not least among these was a food processor with more
attachments than your average Swiss army.
2) For reasons which are beyond the scope of this article, I had an
awful lot of avocado which were getting very ripe.
Obvious conclusion: Guacamole!
Now, I was far from my cookbooks (ok, I was 5 minutes walk from my
cookbooks, but I was in Sainsburys and they weren’t), and I’ve never
made guacamole before in my life. What to do, what to do... Enterprising
young chef that I am, I hit upon a cunning plan.
Ok, it wasn’t very cunning. I picked up a tub of Sainsburys own brand
guacamole and looked at the label.
But it could have been a cunning plan.
Tomatoes, coriander, lemon, chilli, sour cream, a little bit of avocado,
etc. No great surprises. I set off to raid the store for
ingredients.
First hitch, coriander. They had plenty of coriander. However, it looked
really sad. And I mean *really* sad. This isn’t “Kicked puppy” sadness
so much as “I’ve just read the entirety of war and peace in one sitting
and have now lost all will to live” sadness. It was that sad. So,
substitution time. I picked up a pack of flat leaf parsley
instead.
Next substitution: They were out of sour cream. This time War and Peace
was inflicted upon me. Visions of guacamole receded into the distance,
laughing as they ran.
Oh well. Creme fraiche is almost like sour cream, right?
A quick detour via the checkout and time to run gleefully home to attack
my new purchases with spinning blades (of doom).
What I used:
3 largeish and very ripe avocados
4 smallish and rather pathetic looking not very ripe tomatoes
1/2 a medium sized red onion.
1 lime
1 lemon
3 small cloves of garlic
A medium sized bunch of flat leaf parsley.
half a tsp of powdered chilli
2 tsp salt
2 tsp brown sugar
250ml Creme Fraiche.
What I did:
It’s not really rocket science. :-) The short answer is “Blended
everything until it was thoroughly gooped”. You can skip the rest of
this section now.
- Squeezed the lemon and lime (using my cool and shiny juicer attachment on the food processor).
- Switched over to the spinning blades of doom and added the onion, garlic, salt, sugar and chilli. Span until ingredients were thoroughly doomed.
- Added the tomatoes and doomed them too, then the avocado, then the parsley. (I didn’t want the parsley too fine, which is why I added it after there was a healthy quantity of goop to act as buffer).
- Finally added the creme fraiche and ran the food processor until it was all mixed.
Conclusion:
Here’s a quote from immediately after making this:
< David > That is a) An awful lot of guacamole and b) An awful
lot of really damn good guacamole. :)
I don’t really have much further to add to that, except that maybe it
would be worth cooking the onion first next time - the recipe doesn’t
taste too oniony, but it has quite a strong aftertaste of it. Some cumin
might not go amiss either.
Comments
~Nicole on 2007-01-14 17:33:00:
Hey, David,
I just found your blog as I was doing a search for recipes for Mole
Brownies. I had some in a coop Mexican restaurant back in the states
while I was home on Christmas break and they were REALLY good, and now
I’m craving them. Did you ever try to make yours again? Were you able to
fix your recipe? Let me know if you did! I still got some good
suggestions from your entry on what to try. Seems like there really
aren’t many recipes on the web for Mole Brownies. What I’d like to try
next: Mole Hot Chocolate!!!!!
Stop by my site any time!
~Nicole
http://allthingsnicole.spaces.live.com