Well, I have returned safely from my cross-country trip to my honey A telling me "guess what honey?! I volunteered you to make guacamole for my staff retreat tomorrow!" My response... hmmm, I'm not really in the mood and I'm not that confident in my abilities but since it involves an avocado (or three specifically) I guess I'll give it a try. It's not like I haven't made it before, or seen my abuela make many batches upon batches of guacamole with freshly squeezed lemonada yum! But, it's just guacamole is such a personal thing, so many different ingredients can be chosen or omitted so this leads to a dish that many people expect different things from. Imagine my trepidation then when I needed to make enough guacamole for seven of the Minnesota Justice Foundation's finest. This post is especially difficult because as my abuela cooks, there is no true "recipe" it's more like throw a little of this in, a little of that, as you'll see on the recipe card almost all of the ingredients have "to taste" after them. So, it's up to you and I even had to estimate how much of each ingredient I actually put in to actually post this entry! Not too easy!
Because I HATE brown avocado I tend to chop up everything that I am going to put in my guacamole before I peel the avocados. Here you see my delicious tomatoes. You can of course use any kind but these looked the best in the produce aisle so I cut them into fourths.
Then I chopped up my cilantro, with some help from two out of three of my kitchen assistants! The process of taking pictures was time consuming and I was supposed to have my dish ready to go and A came home to get her guacamole and was not happy when she found me taking pictures of my ingredients! But, look at how cute Sandie and A are as they're helping me rinse the cilantro!
After you wash, mince and chop all of your ingredients: tomato, pepper, cilantro, peel your avocados, de-pit them and cut them up into at least quarters. They should slice very easily. **Side note: look at my new shiny red bread box that A bought me
It's so wonderful to have a photographer during my cooking time! A totally helped me by taking photos of all of my steps (almost) from here on out.
At this point squeeze one half of a lime onto your avocado to prevent browning. You can of course use less, but I am a major lime addict.
Unfortunately because of time constraints I wasn't able to fully document my new jalapeño corer that I picked up along my many travels in Nuevo Mejico. It was AMAZING! I cut off the top of the pepper and then inserted my corer in, and gently and quickly scraped out the insides of my pepper! This made slicing and dicing the pepper absolutely amazing!
From this step you need to add all of your ingredients to the bowl, your garlic, salt, tomatoes, cilantro, black pepper, onion if you're using it (I had a special request not to so it's not here) and mash mash mash! I used a big fork, I don't really know of any other tool that will do the trick as well as a good ole fork.
Your finished product should look something like this. Here's the portion of guacamole I took for myself to ensure that I had actually made it edible for others. Unfortunately in A's haste to get to her staff retreat she took my pretty bowl full of guacamole away. But you get the picture, guacamole is like your favorite i-pod playlist, only you know what you want and what will make it good, but there are also always crowd favorites that many people might enjoy.
Off to my next project! I'm baking a cake for A's birthday this weekend and I still have plenty to write about from my travels, including my abuela's enchiladas that are about the best thing I've ever eaten. Yum. Off to my Boulevard Wheat and popcorn snack now!
No comments:
Post a Comment