A while back I was complaining about being over that whole avocado-smashed-on-toast thing, but awesome Ashley suggested an easy switch-up: smashed avocado on corn tortillas. No duh. So simple and obvious and delicious! Just different enough that it’s renewed my (formerly waning) interest in avocado on carbs all over again. Especially if they can be eaten outside on the balcony in the sunshine.
[Lamb's leaf lettuce, French Puy lentils, skilled fried potatoes, shallots, avocado and lime vinaigrette]
We’re meant to get 50cm of snow today. Sigh. It’s March, right? Someone remind me that spring comes, eventually. In the meantime, vegetables for sanity.
[Oh and — congratulations to Kat Tales for scoring a sweet job on the line at Hazelnut Kitchen, the best restaurant in Trumansburg!]
The idea of food as ‘trendy’ is anathema to everything I love about eating and cooking, but doesn’t it seem like avocado on toast is so ‘in’ this summer? I feel silly just typing that, but I keep seeing it everywhere: here, here, here and here (love her additions of mustard and mayo). Maybe it all started with the infamous ‘diet’ avocado-sardine toast that everyone loved.
It’s one of my favorite snacks of all time — embarrassingly simple, savory and fatty. Everyone likes their avocado toast different, but for me the key is a tissue-thin layer of butter as the base, topped with firm wedges of avocado (not a mash), exuberant amounts of freshly cracked black pepper and expensive, flaky salt.
Posted in food, home, lunch, snack
Tagged avocado, avocado toast, breakfast, food trends, snack, wednesday chef
[Spicy black beans, rice, roasted potatoes, cilantro and avocado tacos]
[Braised chicken thighs and red onions with chipotle chiles in adobo with more avocado & minced parsley... tacos]
[Roasted broccoli burrito with leftover shredded chicken, sharp cheddar and leftover tomatillo salsa with spicy coriander and tumeric rice]
Over Memorial Day weekend I went to a totally insane BBQ where I had the best tacos (really) of my life. The marinated carne asada was so tender and sliced so thin it that had the texture of cotton candy. I ate mine with homemade super spicy tomatillo salsa and avocado wedges on grilled corn tortillas. There were also soft, caramelized onions and grilled, fibrous cactus and hot chorizo and gigantic pork ribs that we ate with our fingers and it was just perfect.
I brought boneless, skinless chicken thighs that I had marinating all afternoon in fresh orange pulp, hot sauce, brown sugar, vinegar and olive oil. They were good, but easily schooled by the Cornish game hens that were slathered with chili paste. I don’t even know why I even bother trying. Anyway, my taco looked like this:
The contents of which came off of this lucky grill:
I picked up a lot of killer tricks, watching these guys grill. For example, hot sauce is really good on watermelon wedges. For another, the chorizo sizzled on a baking sheet, so that the juices gathered in the crevices of the pan, and then the corn tortillas were dipped in the bright red pork juices before hitting the grill so that they were essentially frying in fat, getting super crispy and outrageously tasty. Onions were grilled whole until they turned black, skins and all. When they were sliced in half, the insides had turned into this gorgeous onion paste, sweet and soft and spreadable.
So many new techniques to adopt and reframe. Everything I’ve done since then has been a semi-homage to that afternoon, trying to recreate what I ate, as shown by my lame taco-attempts of the first four photos.
Posted in celebration, food, outdoors, party, summer
Tagged avocado, bbq, cactus, carne asada, chicken tacos, homemade, learning, memorial day, mexican food, new techniques, tacos, tortillas