Not everyone can spend days getting their shit together to cook one fucking meal!  This is hopefully an offering to those of us that are in this category.

So let’s just say that, like me, you may not have oodles and oodles of time to commit to a meal or a dish and therefore some of Yeah Right’s meals—while a work of art—are simply unattainable because you lack the two days ahead of time to prep it.  Who knows?  Maybe that’s just me.  Perhaps against better judgment, the culinary artist that is Mr. Right, left it in my very untrustworthy hands to bring you a little gravy.

I cook by texture and color.  I know that may sound very weird.  Recipes are actually pretty hard for me since I tend to shoot from the hip far too often to make for it to translate well normally, but this one should be pretty much ingredient-for-ingredient so I won’t be able to leave something critical out.

This is a dish that looks beautiful, takes minutes, and tastes lovely.  Inspired a bit by Son of Spam, I am sure there are some of you out there who are watching carbs or whatever else you do, and hell, this one is gluten-free if you are into that sort of thing.  I make it with Soyrizo, though a pork chorizo would be just fine.  It involves eggs and I prefer it with a topping of sour cream, so if you are a vegan enjoy your longer and more self-righteous living.  I will at least leave this world with flavor

Enter the avocado…

It is gorgeous and eager to please.  This dish makes a lovely brunch dish and really catches the eye.  There are only three primary ingredients so this is about as easy as it gets.   We are going to work with four avocados tough the whole idea is basically one half per person, so adjust as you need.

Ingredients:

2 LARGE avocados (they don’t have to be especially ripe since we will be baking them and the texture of an unripened avocado gets corrected with the heat)

4 eggs

1 tube of chorizo or Soyrizo

A little crème fraiche, crema, or sour cream

Here we go:

1. Wash your fucking hands. We all take it for granted and I am hopeful that we all do it but let’s start out with the very first element that should ever go into cooking:  halting the fecal-oral route in its tracks with some goddamned soap and water
2. Set your oven to 350°F or about 175°C while you are getting things ready
3. Grab a baking sheet and lay down some parchment or foil to make clean up easier
4. Split and remove the seeds from little green goddesses and lay the cut sides down on the paper or foil on the baking sheet
5. Toss them puppies into the oven and have a drink or whatever you want to do with yourself for 10 minutes. If you opt to masturbate, see Step 1 because that is on you again
6. Grab a towel and pull them back on out. The texture should be pretty creamy at this point.  If they aren’t, then back into the dark, hot dungeon they go for another five minutes.  You should be able to take a soup spoon and scoop out about a tablespoon and a half or about 20 grams.  The measurement isn’t exact.  You can set the extra aside and blend it into to some hummus if you want or feed it to the dog if you want.  We don’t need it anymore for this.  We are making a nesting doll out of an avocado and we want to make sure that there is room for our other guests at this party
7. Next up is our Soy- or chorizo. Again, this is not a measured thing.  We want a dollop that should also be a very heaping soup spoon and slap it into the cavity you just dug out of the avocado.  It should be just a little below the top of our avocado half
8. Back into the over we go for another ten minutes to get our chorizo cooked
9. Pull everyone back out for our ongoing game of Baking Sheet Yo-yo. Take the back of that same spoon and press it into the center of our chorizo.  It should just start to gush over the rim of the sliced avocado.   This works two-fold:  we are making room for our last buddy to come on in and at the same time we are making a little levy to help hold in our egg
10. Crack an egg into each one of our halves. Some of the whites may spill over and this is when you will really have appreciated grabbing the foil or parchment paper
11. You guessed it! Shove our little matryoshka dolls back into the oven again for about another ten to fifteen minutes.  Check on them at ten.  It works best if the yolks remain a little bit on the softer side to blend in with the flavors when we finally cut into to eat it
12. Let’s pull our final product out and get them plated! If you are serving them individually you may want to spoon a little cream or sour cream on to them individually, but I typically will serve them out on a plate of their own and it lets me drizzle them with crema and little bit of a store-bought enchilada sauce
13. Season to taste and dig in!

And with that, I hope we have all learned to appreciate what an awesome job Yeah Right does with this!  This is a pretty pale effort by comparison, but I hope that if any of you try it out, that you enjoy it.  If not, you can always pull up one from a past Sunday!

Mangia!

Bonus recipe!

So last weekend I made Polish dumplings that Yeah Right wanted me to write up this week.  The problem is that I don’t really use a recipe.  Also, the whole point of the avocado is to prove that you can make amazing food without spending hours doing it.  This is definitely not one of those recipes.

For those of you who are interested in pretty sexy pierogi recipe and can handle things being a little fast and loose here is how we get it done:

Filling:

A little over a pound of blue potatoes

¼ head of red cabbage sliced very thinly

¾ pound of kielbasa

¼ cup caramelized shallots

¼ cup of butter

2 tablespoons of madras curry powder

Yes, I said blue potatoes and red cabbage!  People don’t like pierogis because they look bland as shit, and they often are.  Using colorful potatoes and cabbage gives these things character in the end that pays dividends.  Start by peeling and then boiling your potatoes to a mashable consistency—and then get this—mash them.  Don’t use a processor for this because we want a little character to our potatoes.  While they are boiling starting dicing the ever loving shit out of your cabbage and kielbasa; I mean I want them minced.  This has to do with the texture we want in the end.  Throw the butter, shallots, cabbage, kielbasa, and madras curry powder into a hardy-sized pan and cook these guys covered for about fifteen minutes.  Once the potatoes are smashed separately, pour everybody into a mixing bowl and go nuts until you have a thick purplish-green paste (I know that doesn’t read as tasty as it should but it is what happens when the turmeric of the curry powder teams up with the anthocyanins of the cabbage and it actually looks pretty cool).  This is your filling.

Dough:

3 large eggs

3 cups of flour

1 cup of traditional sour cream

¼ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon of cracked black pepper

1 teaspoon of baking powder or potato starch

This is the part that sucks.  If you have ever made your own pasta, you know this is the part that sucks ass.  Mix all of these ingredients in, though I will caution you that I generally add the flour in to everything else about 1/3 at a time and I generally knead this by hand along the way.  Roll it or knead it out thin.  We want this to be about 2-3mm thick.  I basically knead out round balls to be about 4-5 inches in diameter.  This gives me plenty of room to stuff them with an ample amount of the goodness we just made above.  There isn’t a measure for this but imagine about 2 rounded tablespoon per dumpling placed in the center.  Fold it over into a half-circle and press the edges with a fork.  These will be a lot larger than the pierogis you buy at a store where the dough is machine pressed, but the balance really works out better larger.  Now they are ready to boil

Cooking:

Bring a large pot of water to a boil and throw about four or five in at a time.  They sink at first and will then come to the surface they are ready to be pulled out with a slotted spoon and set aside until all of the kids have had their chance in the pool.  But don’t worry, we’re still not done!  Now we take our boiled dumplings and pan fry them with some butter until we are golden brown on each side.  Finish them with anything you would like.  I tended to prefer a creamy cilantro dressing to top them off.