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Everyone has their own way of making guacamole. And 99% of them are pretty good.
Unless they include mayonnaise, sour cream, or those little MSG packets that are sold near the “taco seasoning.” Because if you put any of those things near a precious avocado, then these little tricks can’t help you. You are already lost my friend. And yes, you read that right. I guess in some places mayo is added … umnothanks.
But back to the good stuff – some folks are solidly in the lemon camp, some prefer lime. I know some people add tequila and/or a dash of sparkling water. (I tried adding a splash of tequila recently, and I liked, although I am not sure to be honest if we really noticed it). There are versions with tomatoes and some that go without. I personally generally keep it all green – avocados, cilantro, onion, garlic, citrus and cilantro (s & p of course too) – and skip the tomatoes, but I’ll eat it in your version if you want. All of these options are totally legitimate in my book.
So how can you make your regular recipe better?
Saran wrap and a microplane zester.
1. Grate the garlic. This will give you all the good garlic-y flavor (and even extract some of the juice) without biting into pieces of raw garlic.
2. Press the plastic wrap directly on the guacamole. When I make guacamole, it is generally a bit ahead of time (so the flavors can mingle and things are ready early – let’s face it, guac is generally something you make for parties, guests, etc.), but even if I only make it 5 minutes before serving, I always cover it so it doesn’t oxidize or turn brown too quickly. But stretching the foil or plastic wrap over the top of the bowl won’t help much – there is still plenty of air in there to start the process. By pressing the plastic directly on the avocados, air can’t get it and you’ll have still perfectly green guacamole in 15 minutes or 15 hours later. (Of course if you are going the 15 hour route, refrigerate until ready to use).
What are your secrets to the perfect guacamole?
I have never been very good at taking pictures. I am not {necessarily} talking about how they turn out – I mean just getting them snapped. While some people have pictures from just abut every experience they have had, I have about 2 pictures, total. I have always been having too much fun to remember to document the moment, or at least that is what I tell myself.
So as Billy and I were planning to move back to California, I got a little bummed realizing we had almost no pictures of our time in New York. We had plenty of shots of dinners, but hardly anything else.
So before we left, I called Katie Murphy, who I met at a Sunday Suppers Dinner, and asked if she would be available to do a little photo session of us at some spots around the city.
We got some great images on the Highline, in the Meatpacking District, in front of The Standard (where we lived when we arrived and our first apartment didn’t *quite* work out), in a NYC yellow cab and along the Brooklyn Bridge.
It was such a great thing – not just for posterity’s sake – but we had fun kind-of saying good-bye to all those places, knowing that next time we see them, it will just be as visitors.
I think a lot of people rarely get a photographer just for themselves – it is usually for big occasions – weddings, babies and then regularly with children. After this, I must say, don’t wait for a reason – get some fun, but good, photographs now! (And if you are in New York, I definitely recommend calling Katie!!)
Images via Kate Murhpy Photography (@katiehmurphy)
Everyone needs friends who are comfortable inviting themselves over. I mean it. I have definitely done it on {way} more than one occasion and love when it is done in return.
So when San Francisco had some serious summer weather, finally, I was thrilled that B’s friend Mike sent a text that said, “Drinks, your roof, 8:00.” It was the perfect call, and if he wouldn’t have sent that text, we all may have missed out on margaritas on a perfect balmy night.
And even though I love me a tequila evening, I knew we would need some sort of sustenance as well. With all the heat, I was craving a ceviche, but since I was only heading to the little corner market, I knew fish was out of equation.
Boy – I have really made this linger. I didn’t mean to, I promise, but sometimes that’s just what happens, ya know?
When we first started thinking about the dinner, I knew that we wanted to have a menu that was super simple. Things that required little to no cooking so we could really just enjoy being up at the lake for the weekend and not spending the whole day in the kitchen. Even so, dinner for 20, no matter how simple, takes at least a bit of time.
Thankfully we have awesome friends (who are great in the kitchen & out) and everything came together by committee.
What I was undoubtedly most excited for were the tomatoes. I had seen a few fun posts on Style Notes focusing on summer tomatoes (a tomato tasting from Martha Stewart and a tomato bar during cocktail hour at a wedding) and knew right away lots of heirlooms would be key for a low-stress summer dinner.
I thought it would be fun to highlight the different varieties will a plethora of salts and oils. Sometimes cool salts can be pricy, but when purchased in bulk (and without fancy-schmancy packaging) you can get some great finds at even better prices. We loaded all the salts (plus local crushed chiles and freshly cracked black pepper) in the little dishes from Chinatown and set them out in little grouping among the table for everyone to sample.
We had:
This weekend was one that dreams are made of:
Dinner and mezcal margaritas at Nopalita. A morning swim with a friend. Homemade brunch with the ladies. A stroll about town and some shopping. Dinner at one of my favorite restaurants, Sushi Ran. And was just Friday night and Saturday.
And this brunch!! It was a last-minute idea and was not initially intended to make an appearance here (therefore few photos), but once it came out of the oven, we all quickly snapped a few iphone pics. It just needed to be documented. And once we devoured it, I knew it had to be shared.
I have made baked eggs with spinach before and each time they fell a bit flat. Not bad, but no wows. And so when we were looking at this recipe and truthfully a bit unsure about the yogurt, we decided to go for it, thinking it would add some needed pizzazz. And boy did it!
The chili-sage butter and garlic yogurt took these spinach-baked eggs to another level.
The recipe is adapted from Plenty, a gorgeous cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi. It is a vegetarian cookbook with many of the recipes coming from his New Vegetarian column in the UK’s Guardian. And although I am a devoted carnivore, I want to make/eat/try every.single.recipe in the fantastically photographed, styled and written cookbook.
And this was a great place to start. Next time you are thinking about going out to breakfast with friends, invite them over and make this. It is easily adaptable to increase (or decrease) depending on your group size. My only recommendation is to make sure you have lots of good crusty bread on hand to sop up every last bit of this dish. It wouldn’t be bad with fruit salad and mimosas either, but the bread is a must.
This will definitely be repeated. And soon I gather.
And yes – the food from the party is still coming, I just couldn’t wait to share this with you!!
Baked Eggs with Yogurt and Chili
Because who doesn’t like pictures of a good table? I thought I would share with you some snapshots and details from Saturday’s (rained out) dinner.
Tables, chairs, dishes, glasses & flatware – collected from the house – which gave for a nice mix & match look.
Flowers and vases – Flowers were bought at the Tahoe City Farmer’s market on Thursday (and kept in a bucket of water until Saturday) and then arranged that afternoon. If you can call it arranging. Really the stems were cut short and plopped into these great little svalka cups from Ikea.
Napkins – my favorite dishtowel napkins, tekla, also from Ikea.
Menus, place-cards, salt labels & oil tags – For the menus, I used paper that I had leftover from backing the invites (Paper Source A7 notecards in papaya). The place-cards were also from Paper Source (in night) and for the salt labels and flavored oil tags, I just cut down extra place cards. All of the writing was done with white calligraphy ink.
Salt dishes – picked them up in Chinatown for a song.
Serving dishes – was finally able to break out some of our wedding gifts and put them to good use. Most of the bowls and trays were Vietri Incanto and Mary Jurek.
Water pitchers & decanters – my favorites (and also wedding gifts) from CB2, the beaker glass pitcher and the botella decanter.
Tablecloth – actually just 8 yards of a heavy, but inexpensive fabric from Walmart (a surprisingly great stop for good-priced fabric, especially when you are in a place where you aren’t sure where the nearest fabric store is). It was perfect for this dinner because it covered 3 tables and when it got stained from the bleeding paper in the rain, it didn’t matter.
Tiki torches – picked up last minute from CVS for a little added light.
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I think that is about it. Up next - the food … and after the rain!
Images taken by B as I was finishing in the kitchen with friends. I think we may have a new house photographer on our hands.
This past weekend, we had a little birthday gathering for Billy up in Lake Tahoe. During the days, we boated around, played croquet, bocce ball and corn-hole and just tried to soak up as much sun as possible. And considering many of us were coming from San Francisco and strangely-gloomy LA, we really enjoyed that sunshine.
And so moved all the tables and chairs out of the house and set them up for lovely little dinner party out on the yard.
Or so we thought.
A few scattered sprinkles turned into real raindrops. And as the rain quickened the drops grew to the size of elephant tears. Seriously large raindrops – particularly for California. But then it slowed and we thought we could wait it out. There was plenty of wine on the table.
But when the rain changed to rapid-fire hail, we knew it was time to go in.
I have never seen everything broken down and put away so quickly in my life. Or with so much laughter.
But it wasn’t all lost. We were able to eat (albeit quickly) and enjoy and we even got a rainbow before cake. Suffice it to say it was a birthday we will all remember!
Growing up, my grandmother always had vanilla sugar in an old Schilling canister. She would take the used vanilla beans and let it permeate the sugar – and then use it for cookies, french toast, really any thing that called for or could be improved with vanilla and sugar.
And since I have a penchant for salt, I thought I would try my hand at vanilla salt.
But because I wanted the vanilla to be really present – in smell, taste, and sight – I didn’t just add an empty vanilla bean to the salt. I added the vanilla “caviar” to the salt and mixed it all around with a fork. This way you could really see that it was vanilla. Once it was well combined, I threw in the empty pod too, for good measure.
This salt would be awesome for sweets that call for a bit of salt – think caramels and chocolates, cookies and ice cream. But I can’t wait to use it for things that are traditionally savory. I think that hint of vanilla will open up totally new flavors on some of our favorite things.
This weekend we will be trying it out, with lots of other different salts too, on all variety of heirloom tomatoes – which was the reason for that trip to Chinatown.
Vanilla Salt
This Saturday we are having a little birthday dinner for Billy (and his friend Chris) up in Tahoe, and for part of the dinner I need a bunch of little (inexpensive) dishes. {Think butter pads or teeny sauce/dipping bowls). Thankfully I was chatting with my mom while searching online for restaurant supply stores in SF when she had the genius idea to check out Chinatown.
Which was great, especially since it gave us an opportunity to test out our new camera.
So if things start looking a little better around here (fingers crossed), now you know why.
But back to Chinatown and our little adventure – if you want to buy things besides souvenirs and trinkets, you’ve gotta get to the side streets. And this is true for many ethnic neighborhoods in every city.
After we had gone into about the 4th (or 14th) store with no luck, I realized that something was off – or more accurately, I needed to find where things seemed more off. I needed to be on the streets with bustling (read crowded and not particularly nice smelling) markets, for that is where I would find stores with a bigger (and cheaper) supply of goods. Places where people besides the tourists actually shopped.
And once we made that turn I hit the jackpot.
Rows upon rows of bowls and plates, spoons, teapots, trays, you name it. Plain white, patterned, traditional blues – as far as you could see. Plastic, ceramic, porcelain – they had it all.
And just what I was looking for. White ceramic butter pads/dipping dishes. And do you see the price on those babies? Not even my beloved CB2 can match that.
Thanks Mom for the reminder to look local. I’m already thinking about what else I might need next.
P.S. – Thanks to Deb, Nicole, and Heidi for your posts for regarding camera/food photo advise – big help!
