waiting for avogodot

| kahmen
Avocados: not exactly the world's most photogenic fruit, but oh how we love the taste.

I came back from a week in Dublin and opened my fridge to find my formerly hard-enough-to-be-used-as-a-weapon avocados only marginally less lethal. A whole week had passed, and still they persisted in retaining their rock-like status.

I was not about to become Beckett’s Vladimir or Estragon. I don’t have the patience. So I looked up ways in which to ripen an avocado tout de suite and roadtested them to be sure.

Avocados are climacteric fruits, which means they mature on the tree but ripen off the tree (that’s bananas! – sorry, I couldn’t resist). They give off ethylene gas, which helps them to ripen – so basically every method of artificially ripening them consists of trapping the gas and feeding it back to the avocado to speed the process up. Here are the most popular:

The wine method.
‘Men are like grapes,’ I read once. ‘They need to be stomped on and kept in the dark until they mature into something you’d like to have dinner with.’ Stomping aside, avo-experts recommend storing an avocado at room temperature in the dark.
1.    Place the avocados into a paper bag. If you don’t have a paper bag, wrap them in newspaper. You’re basically encouraging ethylene gas to be produced and then trapping it in the bag.
2.    Add an apple, banana or tomato to the bag as these all give off ethylene.
3.    Check on your avocado every day to see if it’s ripened enough for you to eat it. The skin should give slightly when pressed.

The dinner party method.
You wanted to impress people with your homemade guacamole – Mexican is so in, darling – only to discover, to your absolute horror, that your avocados have stubbornly refused to ripen. The bag method is out because you didn’t think that far ahead. Never fear! As a very last resort, you can microwave your avocados to help them soften.
1.    Prick the skin of the avocado.
2.    Place onto a paper towel on a plate.
3.    Microwave it in 30-second bursts until it becomes soft enough to eat.

The avocado gets surprisingly hot in 30 seconds so be careful when you pull it out of the microwave!

Allegedly you can also wrap the avocados in foil and place into a low-heat oven for 10-15 minutes to achieve the same result, but being ovenless it’s not something I could check out.

They say this is the very last resort because it will alter the avocado’s flavour. It also becomes a bit strange on the textural front, but it’s not bad and if you’re going to make guac I doubt anyone will notice anything apart from how fabulous Mexican food really is.

not tabouleh

| kahmen

THIS IS NOT TABOULEH.

I’ve got to say that before all my Lebanese friends come after me, pelting me with falafels (which I maybe wouldn’t mind as much as I should). Real tabouleh is made with parsley, bulgur wheat, lemon juice, spring onion and mint. Calling this tabouleh would be like saying sushi is Chinese because it’s made with rice. Big no-no.

But as potentially culturally offensive as this little salad is, the ingredients were what I had in the fridge when I came home at about 8pm after a day of hardcore shopping and I certainly was not about to traipse out to get anything else. I very nearly reached for the pasta and sauce, but I didn’t, and I’m glad. This dish tastes wonderful – zingy and fresh and healthy – so I’m going to post it here for you to enjoy under the proviso that you all understand that calling it tabouleh would be a mistake, a misrepresentation, an egregious error.

The Not-Tabouleh Salad
Bunch of parsley, chopped
Two tomatoes, finely chopped
Quarter of a red onion, very finely chopped
3 tbsp of couscous
Juice of one lime
Olive oil

Parsley is wonderfully springy and robust, but the key is to get it as dry as humanly possible before chopping it, otherwise it ends up in a soggy mess. You can just use paper towels to pat the leaves after you’ve washed it. I know people who use a salad spinner to get it really dry before chopping it, which is great but a little Mission Impossible for the small kitchen.

When chopping parsley, grab the stalks and chop from the leaves down. Get it right the first time because the ‘running the knife through again’ technique that I often use to make things are properly chopped doesn’t really fly with parsley – you can end up bruising the leaves and they get soggy. In any case, don’t fret if there are one or two leaves sticking out at the end. Make sure you’ve chopped enough that the parsley salad is really about the parsley, not the couscous.

Combine the parsley, couscous, tomato and onion (I’m not wild about raw onion, so I only used a quarter, but use your judgement). I don’t like lashings of olive oil dripping everywhere so I used just the tiniest drizzle and then squeezed the lime juice over. Mix well and serve by itself, or with romaine lettuce leaves.

I may have also helped myself to the world’s largest scoop of hummus. Why not?

simple salsa

| kahmen

Those of you who are quick on the uptake (or just really passionate about food) have probably spotted the glaring problem with the photo on my guacamole entry.
Salsa, of course! It’s not there!

I had committed the culinary equivalent of placing Romeo without Juliet, Mickey without Minnie, Abelard without Heloise (although she would have been much better off without him, in my opinion). I don’t quite know how it happened, but let’s just say that I was overcome with the excitement of learning how to make guacamole that I simply forgot about the unbroken pact between guac and salsa.

I’m going to rectify that now, because trying to have a Mexican meal without salsa just isn’t right. I won’t allow it.

Salsa
3 tomatoes
Quarter of an onion
One deseeded chilli
Small handful of fresh coriander
Salt
Squeeze of lime juice

Finely chop the tomatoes, onion, chilli and coriander. Combine in a bowl and add salt and lime juice to taste. Nothing simpler!

holy guacamole

| kahmen

Mexican cuisine is like the lover who sporadically makes appearances in your life and works his way back into your heart by charming you with something new and exciting each time. After a particularly long run of soups and salads and sandwiches, Mexican shows up and you vaguely consider settling down – because it has flavour, texture, heat and sweetness and crunch and comfort; everything you could possibly want in a cuisine.

It amuses me to tell you that for the longest time I didn’t like avocados. I used to scrape the guacamole off my nachos and give it to my bestie. In fact, I didn’t like avocados until I came to this country and tried guacamole at Wahaca.

Slowly, I’ve fallen in love with the creamy texture and subtle, fresh taste. Guacamole is something indescribably complex; muted creaminess balanced with the spike of raw onion, chunks of soft flesh, a sharp note of lime juice and of course the flavour kick of coriander. These days I’m drawn irrepressibly to the vivid, iridescent green whenever I’m in a Mexican restaurant.

Guacamole
3 x large ripe avocados*
Half a red onion, very finely chopped
1 lime
Small handful of coriander, finely chopped
Salt

Mince the coriander and half the onion, chopping as finely as humanly possible. If you’re lucky enough to have a mortar and pestle, use that. Otherwise, a little muscle on the chopping board will do. Place into a bowl, add a pinch of salt.
Scoop the flesh from the avocados, add to the bowl and mash with a fork. Add half the lime juice as you go.
When you’ve got a rough guacamole, add the rest of the lime and onion and mix well. Season with black pepper and more salt if necessary.

If you like, you could add additional coriander leaves, chilli or a deseeded tomato.

*It’s easy to buy avocados from Sainsbury’s or Tesco, where they’re the cheapest, but often the ‘ready to eat’ avocados are about as hard as hockey pucks or else they’re descending into that really icky soft rotten place. Press gently on the small tip and if it gives just slightly you’re in luck. Otherwise buy firm avocados a few days ahead and keep them in the fridge.

the tiny kitchen

| kahmen

My name is Kahmen, and I’m a Londoner by choice.

I moved to this country almost a year ago, and whilst my ever-present mad love affair with food and food enthusiasts continued uninterrupted, I also discovered just how flexible the term ‘generous’ can be when it comes to kitchen space. Let’s be honest, I’ve had cupboards bigger than my tiny attic studio. This is fine. My affection just gets concentrated because it’s over a smaller area.

But working with a very small space presents unique problems in the kitchen. What seemed so easy is now next to impossible; translating recipes using eleven vegetables and five pots and pans is frustrating and often messy (putting plates of meat on the floor so you can chop the herbs is at best strange, and at worst unhygienic). I spent many months juggling breakfast bench space with sink space and two-hob stove space and at the end, when I perched on my couch with the hokkien noodle stir-fry and surveyed the pile of washing up to be done, it hardly seemed worth the hassle. No wonder the 2 for £3 soup offer at M&S gets a workout.

I know I’m not alone when I say that I search for healthy, delicious food that is easy to prepare. Isn’t everyone? I don’t necessarily subscribe to the one-pot cooking technique, which can be limiting, but I promise that all these recipes can be reasonably accommodated in a small space without too much drama.

Because cooking should be fun and above all, it should be worth it!