When I’m pensive, worried or stressed out, I often find myself in my kitchen, dazed and chopping for the sake of chopping. There is an element to cooking that I find amazingly cathartic, like the concerns of real life, like the vegetables on the board, are being deconstructed into perfect squares–bite size palatable chunks that I can configure and comprehend in many different ways.
For some reason, pensive cooking is also when I make the weirdest shit imaginable. Night before my thesis defense? From scratch jerk-marinara sauce (which I never ate). After my last bad breakup? curried noodles with blueberry sauce. (I ate that one, and it was damn good)
I’m contemplating a rather serious decision these days. What do I do? I cook an avocado. That’s right folks, I cooked a fucking avocado. No, I wasn’t drunk.
I took some lovely zucchini, spring shallot and Anaheim chiles I picked up at the Co-op farmer’s market and roasted them a bit on a silpat (around 375). On the lower tray I put an avocado, halved, cut side down in a touch of oil.
It took no more than 10 minutes for the veggies and avo to be done–the avocado crisped up to a nice dark brown on the contact points, the half dome left from the pit was firmer than when raw. The inside of the avocado was soft as butter and the flavor slightly different, in a way I’m finding hard to describe.
I then took the lightly roasted shallots, peppers and avocado and pounded the shit out of them in my mortar and pestle, adding some hawaiian pink salt, black pepper and fresh oregano and red wine vinegar. I then added MPed cucumber and radish.
I blanched some almonds and tossed them in some garlic oil and added those as well.
but oh no, I was not done yet. I decided to try this cooked guacamole as a sauce on Pasta–a creepy, crazy primavera, I guess–so I boiled off some spaghetti. I used some pasta water to dilute the sauce a bit then tossed the two together and refrigerated until cool.
The avocado disappeared, binding itself in a thin sheen to every strand of the pasta, giving not only an oddly disconcerting soylent-green hue to the dish, but tons of creaminess and flavor. The mixture of raw cuke and radish was great with crunchy almonds and soft roasted zucchini.
