Guacamole


It’s hot in Singapore, stupidly hot these last few days, and all I could do today was nod off to sleep while my baby tried to clamber off various pieces of furniture, and my wife asked why we didn’t possess an espresso machine to rectify my sleepiness. It wouldn’t help: this wasn’t about a caffeine deficiency, but a bone-deep exhaustion, the kind where your feet and legs and arms all hurt. Not the ache of good exercise, but proper twinges of pain, to make you feel they’re not well-used but actually damaged in some profound and significant way. A Nespresso won’t fix that.

In the evening, we made our own guacamole.

It was only then that I felt even half human, half capable of lifting my head up and looking around. This may have been because we bastardised the recipe we found and applied our own rules to it: having been caught out or betrayed so many times by online cooking advice, we’ve become quite sceptical about the quantities and proportions recommended in recipes.

One avocado.
A lime.
Half a small onion.
A handful of cherry tomatoes.
A jalapeno pepper.
A clove of garlic.
A dash of cumin, salt and chilli powder.
Cilantro

Mash up the avocado in a bowl, before squeezing the juice from the lime on top, and stirring. Then chop up the onion, garlic, pepper and tomatoes, and stir those in. Add the chilli powder, cumin and salt, and continue to stir, finishing off with the cilantro. Let it rest at room temperature (in our 35 degree kitchen) for as long as it takes you to prep a couple of bean fajitas, then eat.

Next time, I might omit the jalapeno: it was possibly a little too hot for my tastes. However, this is wonderfully simple as recipes go, incurring no more washing up than a fork, a sharp knife, a bowl and a cutting board. One avocado makes a decent amount of guacamole for a single person, roughly the same as a tub would contain if you bought it from the supermarket. A tub of guacamole is about $10 in Singapore, so it’s twice as expensive to buy as it is to make it yourself. And it tastes better, so unless your time is insanely valuable and you don’t like food, there’s very little to justify store-bought, mass produced guacamole.

If only I’d known this before I ate all those tubs of guacamole in the last five years. I could have taken the money and spent it on buying twenty packets of cigarettes. Or rather, not spent it on buying twenty packets of cigarettes, and saving it all.

If only I’d saved all the money I didn’t spend on cigarettes because I don’t smoke, I’d have a fortune by now. Or be in prison for abusing counterfactuals.

I’m going to bed soon, hoping that tomorrow I feel full of fun and verve once more. Or that it isn’t so punitively hot. Maybe one of these is possible.


One response to “Guacamole”

  1. Very healthy, avocadoes. Bound to make you feel better. Unlike the various ingredients for eclairs that formed my dinner tonight.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.