It’s Still Guacamole To Me

Sometimes it’s the little things …… there are so many ways to finish that thought.  One of my favorites is a line from the Robert Earl Keen song It’s the Little Things, and it goes like this, “….. that piss me off.”  In this instance, though it was a little thing, it didn’t piss me off.  Instead, it made me smile.

A couple of weekends ago Pam said, “I bought too many avocados, and they are about to go bad.  Why don’t you eat some?”  I am a Southern California boy, and avocados are in my DNA. I just don’t eat too many of them too often.  It’s not that I do not like them.  I do.  I just don’t put them in things I usually eat.  For some reason, her comment resonated with my stomach, and I decided to eat an avocado or two.  The only issue I had was deciding how to consume them.  I mean, it’s not like I wanted to just bite into a peeled avocado.

Six months ago it would have been pretty simple.  All I would have had to do was make some guacamole, open the cupboard and grab some tortilla chips.  After my last not so glowing visit to the internist, I have stopped buying tortilla chips.  I used to buy a bag a week.  Now it’s been six months since I bought a bag.  No chips meant no guacamole, which left me in a quandary, not knowing with what to eat Pam’s avocados.

I gave it some more thought, and as I did, inspiration struck:  Avocado Toast!  I had been hearing about this foodie way to consume avocados for some time.  Yes, I like to cook, but I am by no means a foodie.  In fact, I am about as far from being a foodie as a vegan is from endorsing The Atkins Diet.  I have never ordered avocado toast.  I am not sure I am cool enough or millennial enough to frequent a restaurant that serves it.  I know that it is an overpriced hors d’oeuvre, causing millennials to delay their retirement.  I have never put avocado on toast without bacon, lettuce, tomato and turkey or chicken to accompany it.  Heck, I had no idea how avocado toast was made nor did I know if I needed special bread to toast.  However, it was a Sunday, and I had gone to Whole Foods on my way home from the gym that morning.  I had a fresh ciabatta roll sitting in the kitchen just waiting to be consumed.  I assumed that it would be perfect for my avocado toast.

At that point, I googled avocado toast and read the recipe.  I was not overwhelmed.  There was not much to it.  It was almost like making guacamole sans the tomatoes, onions, cumin and cilantro.  So I made avocado toast.  It took about five minutes, including the time it took to toast the ciabatta.  I have to admit I liked it, and it opened up a whole new vista for avocado consumption for me.  So much so that when Pam said she bought more avocados last weekend, I was a little disappointed that I did not have any ciabatta rolls upon which I could spread some avocado, but I did have a couple of frozen bagels in the freezer…..

I made avocado toast for the second weekend in a row.  As I did, I asked Kim, my younger daughter who had recently returned from vacationing in Australia and was staying over for the weekend,  if she wanted some.  She had not heard about my first attempt, but she was impressed with this one.  She asked, “Dad, are you taking your first step on the path to becoming a millennial?”

Coming from Kim, that was a compliment because usually she just comments on my advancing age in a less than flattering manner.  She asked me what I was going to put it on.  I shattered our millennial  moment a microsecond later when I replied, “A bagel.”

It’s not worth discussing the avocado toast any further.  Obviously, it was good, even on a bagel, though the bagel did bring the whole effect down a little.  It really does not take much skill to make, and it would be hard to mess up.  What was worth noting and thinking about was how a simple little thing like smashing an avocado and spreading it on toast instead of dipping a chip into it can change how I was perceived.  One act was unexpected and cool.  The other would have been expected and commonplace.  Yet there would have been no fundamental difference between the acts.  I am not a deep enough thinker to delve into the ramifications of that.  I will leave that to those that are.  I was just happy that for a brief instant my younger millennial thought I might still be relevant in her world.