Guacamole by Mortar & Pestle

Last weekend Dennis and I met my parents for dinner at this Mexican restaurant called El Dorado. My dad ordered some guacamole and the waitress actually wheeled out a cart and made it for us at the table. It was pretty awesome, and Dennis was very taken with it. I deduced it after he asked me to get us a mortar & pestle while I was at Marshalls this week. I have mad deduction skills!

I got us some stuff to make guacamole and so tonight we made it. I learned from the recipe that guacamole comes from two Aztec Nahuatl words - ahuacatl & molli, or "avocado sauce." Interesting stuff!

Ingredients
2 avocados
1/3 red onion
1-2 hot peppers (I used 1 jalapeno and 1 purple coffee pepper)
2 tbsp cilantro leaves, finely chopped
1 tbsp lime juice
1/2 tsp salt
Dash of pepper
1/2 tomato (about 1/4 cup)

This is pretty basic. Just put all of the ingredients in the bowl and mash them up! If you don't have a mortar & pestle then you can use a fork to smash up the avocado. My dad told me to watch the waitress cut up the avocado, which was great because she did it way more quickly and efficiently than I used to. Well, never again!

She sliced it in half, longways around the seed. Then to remove the seed, she just whacked it with the knife so it got stuck, then pulled it out with the knife.

Neato!

Once the seed was out, Dennis just scooped the avocado out with a spoon and dumped it into the mortar. Then he started pestling.

Action shot!

Close up

 Then we added all the other ingredients and pestled some more. Annnnd scene!

This guacamole was pretty awesome and very easy to make. One quick tip - the recipe said don't add the tomatoes until right before they are being served. I'm guessing the tomatoes go bad more quickly than the rest of the ingredients. We put half of the recipe in a tupperware in the fridge, then added the tomato to the rest and pestled that as well.

Here is the link to the original recipe.

Prepping for Some Guacamole!

So I didn't actually make anything new for this post, but I wanted to talk about some stuff so I made up a post for it. First of all, look at my peppers.

The green ones are jalapenos, and the orange & red are... wait for it... PURPLE Trinidad coffee peppers. Say what? I read on some forums that they mature and turn red, but they have been turning orange also. This is insane. Note - they are still hot as all hellfire.

I said I didn't make anything new, but I did make something... more pineapple salsa. I had some on top of salmon last week and I was licking the freakin plate afterward (that is a slight exaggeration). However, I only used purple peppers in it, and I added more than last time. I was seriously coughing while I was cutting these peppers because they were so hot they invaded my face. I had to step back from the counter... that is actually NOT an exaggeration. I'm a little scared to eat this salsa, but I will be brave and keep some milk and bread nearby.

Don't look directly into the orange flecks!

For some reason, stores only sell cilantro in boat-loads so I have a ton of it left over. Dennis & I are going to make guacamole on Friday, so we'll use some more for that, but I still feel like I need to find more recipes that use it so it doesn't go to waste. I looked up how to preserve cilantro online and I found this: put it in a glass of water and stick it in the fridge. Easy peezy.

My cilantro bouquet

The last time I made mango avocado salsa, I saved the avocado seed and cared for it and loved it and stuff, and now it's a big avocado tree! Ok not really, but I did stick 3 toothpicks in it and suspend it in some water.

That was over a month ago, maybe 2 months ago, and since then the bottom has cracked open and roots are coming out! OMG! I even had to move it to a bigger glass so the roots could expand. I just have to wait for a stalk to come out of the top and then maybe I can put it in a pot with soil or something. Yay.

Wouldja look at that? Awesome. It's a bummer though, because I have read and heard from people that they rarely bear fruit. Sad. Well maybe MINE will be the one exception. :) That's all for now, ta-ta!

Garden on June 29

The garden is off the hook, simply put. It is insane. Every morning when I take the dogs out, I take a look at it, feeling like a kid on Christmas excited to see what's there. As you can see from the last several posts, we have harvested a bunch of fruits/veggies and have used them in a couple of different ways. I've made zucchini bread and salsa, and yesterday Dennis asked me to make him a veggie sandwich, using cucumber, banana peppers, red onion, and spinach. The onion and spinach were store-bought, but hopefully my spinach seedlings will be edible soon!!

Spinach. I can kinda make out the leaves!

We got the cucumber from AJ's garden. Last night Dennis went out to fix out tomato stake-funnel thingy and as he was wandering around with his trusty Maglite, he spotted a monster cucumber. AJ said we could have it, so Dennis picked it and took a picture of it next to his arm to show how big it was.

 Huge cuke, plus a close-up of the bionic arm! I used that cucumber in his veggie sandwich.

Speaking of cucumbers, here's one of ours. It's probably about 4 inches. I found a recipe that uses cucumber in salsa - yum! Also, as Dennis remembers from The Other Guys, cucumber water is extremely refreshing. :)

Here's my next big zuke. I had 2 that got to this stage and then crapped out, so I harvested them and saved the bulb part in the hopes that it would be salvageable for my next batch of zucchini bread.

These carrots are crazy, but it looks like they are all growing in a big clump. Every one I have harvested looks like a gnarled finger. Sorry for the visual.

Here's my lettuce. It's probably about an inch off the ground, which means I need to start thinning it out soon. That makes me sad. I don't want to waste any!

My cilantro. Looks kind of weird, I know. But it has been doing better since I picked the flowers off of it. I won't let it go the way of my first spinach plant. *cry*

This is my strawberry plant. We had some strawberries, then some birds ate them. Ever since then, the tendrils have been crawling everywhere but no more strawberries yet. The main plant is at the bottom and you can see all the vines crawling every which way. Dennis took my cage off because he thought it was holding the plant back. Well we'll see... now that the birds aren't intimidated by the scary cage, I don't know what's going to happen.

This is just a shot of how many freakin purple peppers there are. I'm waiting to see if some of them turn red. So far I have used the purple peppers in salsa and Jamaican jerk pork chops.

FINALLY! A jalapeno! This has been the last plant to bear fruit (other than the peanuts, which grow underground, so who knows what the hell is happening with them). I can't wait to make something fun with these, like jalapeno poppers.

My bell pepper! Look how big it is. Now I just have to wait for it to turn red.

This is the insane watermelon plant. It crawls everywhere, and it has little tendrils that reach out and curl around anything within reach.

But it's gonna give me watermelons!! This is the biggest one I've found so far. Notice I used the word found, because you really have to search around the vine to find these. I'm sure once they get bigger I'll be spotting them left and right.

And one last beautiful picture to end on. This is the flower that has bloomed the most on either one of the black-eyed susans.

Community Garden

My street is awesome. My neighbors, more specifically, are awesome. We grill together, play cornhole in the street, have each other's backs... you catch my drift. I like living here.

One of my neighbors, Meeg, had this great idea about making a garden in this big open grassy area on the street that we affectionately call "Dogland." She planned everything & put it all together, and we all threw some money at her, and voila, we had a garden.

4-2-11

We spent a day filling our beds with Leafgro (pictured above), then we spent another day shopping for plants & then had a little planting party. It involved beer. Aww yea. On that day (err, night), me & Dennis' bed looked like this:

4-30-11

So tiny. After a couple more weeks of gratuitous watering, our bed looked like this:

5-17-11

Not such a great comparison picture, but you can see that our plants have started sprouting up.

5-29-11

Why I keep taking these pictures at night, and at weird angles, I don't know.

Yesterday (6-8-11) I finally decided to go out with my camera (not my phone) and take some pictures during the day. I got some great shots of developing plants that are just starting to bear fruit. Yay!

Banana peppers

Purple Trinidad coffee peppers

Cayenne peppers

Zucchini

Carrot

And finally, one wide shot of the whole garden, taken today.

6-9-11

What a difference! We haven't eaten anything from our garden yet (except that little carrot, which tasted... like a carrot) but hopefully we'll be able to harvest soon. Stay tuned for updates!!

Mango and Peach Salsa

After trying the Mango Avocado Salsa recipe 4 or 5 times, Dennis decided he wanted me to find another salsa recipe. I found this Mango & Peach Salsa recipe and it looked pretty easy so I gave it a whirl. It was even easier than the first one.

Ingredients

2 mangos, peeled and chopped

2 fresh peaches, peeled and chopped

1 sweet onion, diced

1 medium tomato, diced (optional)

2 cloves garlic

2 tbsp chopped fresh cilantro

juice of one lime

dash salt and pepper

Toss them all together in a bowl. Easy peezy lemon squeezy.

Here is the original recipe from About.com.

Mango Avocado Tomato Salsa

Finally, the real reason behind the whole blog. The salsa. It came to us in a combination of ways.. there is a lovely restaurant in Salisbury, MD called Cactus Taverna that serves mango slices on top of their entrees and it really adds a great flavor to fish.

We decided that we wanted to try mango on our own fish. Dennis talked to my mom about mango/peach salsa and said he wanted to try to make some at home. So we planned on making the salsa to put on top of some tuna steaks that we got from Target. I know right? Target has a really great grocery section now, in case you didn't know.

Anywho, Dennis asked me to find a recipe for mango salsa, and this is the first one I found. The prep work is time consuming, but once you have finished you just toss all of the ingredients together and let them mellow.

Ingredients

1 mango - peeled, seeded and diced

1 avocado - peeled, pitted, and diced

4 medium tomatoes, diced

1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and minced

1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons fresh lime juice

1/4 cup chopped red onion

3 tablespoons olive oil

Combine the mango, avocado, tomatoes, jalapeno, cilantro, and garlic in a medium bowl. I have a slap-chop type device that I use to dice all of the ingredients. It seems to work well and it is a lot easier than cutting everything with a knife.

We bought 2 of everything so that we could try the recipe twice. The second batch was better because everything was a lot riper so I would recommend buying your ingredients a few days in advance.

We used jarred jalapenos & jarred minced garlic for the recipe but you could try to get them fresh. We just kind of eyeballed it as far as the amounts go, but it ended up being about 8-10 jalapeno slices and 2.5 teaspoons of minced garlic.

Stir in the salt, lime juice, red onion, and olive oil. Just FYI - one large lime will give you 2 tablespoons of juice, but if the limes are on the small side I would get 2. To blend the flavors, refrigerate for about 30 minutes before serving.

We grilled the tuna steaks and did some boil-in-a-bag white rice, then put a scoop of salsa on the plate. The meal was perfect.

This tastes amazing the day after you make it. We had it stored in a mixing bowl with a lid, but the lid isn't 100% airtight and when I opened the fridge the next morning, the amazing aroma hit me in the face like a 2x4. I was getting creamer for my coffee and I started wondering if salsa would be good for breakfast! I ate it later in the day with tortilla chips and it was excellent.

The second time we made the recipe, we doubled the mango and it was still amazing. I had salmon and Dennis had chicken, and they both went very well with the salsa.

Here is the original link from AllRecipes.com.

7 Layer Dip

To be perfectly honest, I shouldn't call this a 7 layer dip because I don't use them all, but I'll include my version as well as my mom's (the REAL 7 layer dip).

Ingredients

1 can of refried beans

1 12 oz. tub of sour cream

guacamole

2 cups shredded cheddar cheese (or more)

chopped jalapenos

halved cherry tomatoes (optional)

chopped black olives (optional)

1 packet of taco seasoning (optional)

I am not really giving a good description of the amounts because they are all relative to your tastes. This dip is impossible to mess up so it doesn't matter if you have too much sour cream or whatnot, because people are just going to eat around the parts they don't like anyway.

You'll need a shallow pan or dish (not too shallow though). You could use one of those 8x8 Pyrex dishes and it would probably work nicely. I put the refried beans at the bottom because they are the most dense & it is easier to spread the other layers on top of it. I use a spatula to spread it out until it coats the entire bottom of the dish. Don't worry about getting it perfectly flat, it will taste the same in the end!

Then I put the guacamole down. I didn't put an amount for this one because I have seen it in a tub as well as in a sealed plastic packet, so whatever form you find it in, just get one and that should be enough (or anything close to 12 oz. is always a safe bet). I recommend putting dollops of it evenly around the dish so it is easier to spread out without moving the layer of refried beans underneath. 

Now the next layer is the sour cream. My mom mixes a packet of taco seasoning in with the sour cream before spreading it. Dennis doesn't like taco seasoning so we just use plain sour cream. Again, drop a few dollops on top of the guacamole to spread it around more easily.

Now spread the shredded cheese on top of the whole mix. Easy enough. At this point, I usually spread the jalapenos on top and call it a night. However, the last few times I have made this, I have found that I favor the tomatoes more and more so they go on with the jalapenos. However, I draw the line at black olives. If you like them, spread them on top with the tomatoes and jalapenos.

There you have it! This dip is great for parties when you have to bring a dish. In fact, my friend Wally doesn't like cake so I made this for him for his birthday one year. He asked me to use ground beef instead of refried beans. The result tasted great but it was kind of hard to dip & the chips kept breaking. In the future, if I'm going to add ground beef I would mix it with the refried beans.