Avo­ca­do Dip a la Lit­tle Cran­ber­ry Island

Avo­ca­do Dip a la Lit­tle Cran­ber­ry Island

1 avo­ca­do, nice and ripe (so you can make an inden­ta­tion in the flesh, but don’t go crazy doing this), peeled and the seed tak­en out)

Wait.

Let me inter­rupt myself and teach you how to pre­pare an avo­ca­do. I had to learn the hard way, where you man­gle many, many avo­ca­dos and are final­ly tak­en to task by some more knowl­edge­able din­ner guest watch­ing you be your idiot self. You hold it in one hand and using a nice par­ing knife, pierce the avo­ca­do with the tip till you feel the seed inside, then run your knife all the way around the avo­ca­do, mak­ing con­tact with the seed at all times. Then hold each half of the avo­ca­do in a hand and twist till it comes apart. Then VERY CARE­FUL­LY ease your knife tip into the seed (I once com­plete­ly stabbed myself in the palm doing this, so deeply that it did­n’t even bleed, and it had to be patched up by my din­ner guest who hap­pened to be a doc­tor — a der­ma­tol­o­gist, but I could­n’t be choosy). Wig­gle the knife in the seed VERY CARE­FUL­LY till you dis­lodge the seed and then dis­card it. Now pull the skin off the whole avo­ca­do and either slice nice­ly for a sal­ad or in this case…

Place avo­ca­do in food proces­sor or blender. Add:

three table­spoons sour cream
three table­spoons goat cheese
sev­er­al shakes Tabasco
juice of a lime, juice of a lemon
salt to taste

Whizz till com­plete­ly smooth. This with lob­ster or crab is DIVINE. Unless, like my moth­er who is oth­er­wise per­fect, you feel that avo­ca­do is infe­ri­or to mod­el­ling clay as a food.

The evening of the Cur­rans’ arrival we had a gor­geous din­ner as well, if I do say so myself, and real­ly a diet chick­en sal­ad din­ner. For when you’re in a no-carb mood. The chick­en sal­ad idea is mod­i­fied from a love­ly lunch my friend Kath­leen served to me at her house in Mys­tic, Con­necti­cut. With it I served my pink gaz­pa­cho (recipe in an ear­li­er post from May).