What’s the guac?

Picture the scene: You’ve purchased two ‘ripe and ready to eat’ avocados and, upon arrival at home you’re planning on halving one up and spreading its luscious green flesh onto a slice of freshly toasted, thick granary bread. You might add a few pinches of salt and maybe even some chilli flakes or sriracha. However, your dream lasts as long as it takes to cut into that first fruit and you discover that its erstwhile luscious flesh is now as black and as wizened as witches’ snot. What a hateful hanlin.

That short story is my main gripe with the avocados that we encounter in these parts. Most likely, since they’ve travelled such a long way, the journey and the time they take to arrive, has done nothing for their general comportment.

The other side of the proverbial coin of course is that the avocados are as hard as bricks and no amount of liaisons in bags with ripening bananas is ever going to soften their demeanour. That shorter story is my other gripe with the avocados that we encounter in these parts. But ultimately, locally purchased avocados are either overripe and mushy or will never ripen in my lifetime.

And yet, the quest for that perfect avocado continues.

Last week, me being the millionaire that I am, I bought six avocados on three separate occasions. Before each purchase, I carried out the touch test. I was looking for fruits that yielded – just slightly – to firm but gentle pressure. All felt good, none felt overly mushy and so I reckoned I was onto a winner. You can imagine my eye-twitching, hypertension-enducing disappointment when only one – from the last couple bought – was not witches’ snot.

As far as I’m aware, a perfectly ripe avocado is only ‘perfect’ for one day. My problem is, I can tell when they’re under-ripe by touch (they’re hard and unyielding), but I have bother discerning when the fruit is just perfect.

I’m also aware of the argument that I shouldn’t be buying avocados at all but rather opting for what is grown on a seasonal basis down the road. Like so many fruits that we almost take for granted like bananas, oranges and to a lesser extent, grapes, avocados don’t arrive in our supermarkets exactly free from air-miles and an associated carbon footprint (apparently most avocados are grown in Mexico due to the year round growing climate). And yet arrive in our supermarkets they do and for good or ill, someone is going to buy them.

I can also counter my own air-miles quibble by saying that as opposed to meat products, imported avocados have much less of a carbon footprint – only a small fraction, in fact. Consequently, the quest for that perfect avocado continues.

At this stage you might be wondering why in under Good God am I so infatuated with avocados. Well, in short, I discovered a recipe for a mildly spiced avocado pasta. Blitzed with a little olive oil, garlic, lemon (or lime), chilli, grated parmesan and seasoning, the ripe avocado apparently translates into a silky smooth sauce for the linguine – or whatever shape of pasta you fancy using. Alas, could I find two perfectly ripe avocados? I could not – but it wasn’t for a lack of trying.

Out of the six avocados, when I opened the fifth and it too was black and nightmarish, I almost – ALMOST – fired the last fruit into the bin in a huff. Instead, taking a deep breath and swallowing down my botheration, I cleaned the big kitchen knife from all the residual nightmare snot and cracked open the final purchase.

“Thank Fintona for that,” I said, upon seeing the unsullied green flesh. Whilst my pasta dream was shot, this one was too ripe to waste.

The result is the picture included on this page. The pea-green flesh was forked onto hot granary bread. Pinches of salt were added, along with a few diagonal lines of sriracha. And then for good measure and to create perhaps the perfect mixture maxture lunch, I added some left-over egg and onion mix from the day before and a goodly dollop of home-made Scotch Bonnet sauce.

“This is the best thing I’ve eaten since… well… breakfast,” I announced to no-one in particular.

My failed avocado pasta dish mission provided a salutary lesson: Sometimes the best things aren’t what we’re looking for, but what we find along the way.