Simple ingredients, quick prep, and super versatile. Depending on where you put it, it’s a dip, a spread or main ingredient.
That doesn’t mean the recipe can’t be abused – I saw a celebrity chef on PBS once take 18 minutes to create “classic guacamole” and it involved five different roasted vegetables and sweet peas.
More importantly, though, the recipe can be super simplified.
I have a basic recipe (which requires six ingredients and takes 5 minutes) and this one, which requires three items and takes less than 60 seconds.
Remove the pit from the avocado, and scoop flesh from the peel.
In a bowl, add the salsa to the avocado. Use a fork to smash.
When close to the desired consistency, add the splash of lime juice and stir to combine
Recipe Notes
Top guacamole tip: Only make what you can consume in one sitting. Sure, there are a million tricks for keeping it from turning brown, but it is really best served fresh.
I’m sorry I didn’t post this last week in time for Cinco de Mayo, but it was while I was looking up recipes for dinner that night that I realized, again, that sometimes the Internet lies.
Post after post, video after video, all explaining and showing what has come to be believed as the best way to pit an avocado.
I’ll link to this one for you, but you probably don’t have to see it. Using a very big knife, you are supposed to cut all around the avocado pit, creating a nearly cut in half item that needs to be twisted apart. Once the parts are separated, you are to smack the pit with the big knife to remove it.
I have several issues with this technique, but I’ll limit myself to two here:
What is up with all the huge knives in the avocado videos? When ripe, you don’t need German or Japanese forged steel to force them open.
I don’t know about you, but usually when I’m making guacamole, alcohol is involved. Smashing down toward my hand with a sharp knife doesn’t feel like a recipe for success (pun intended, sorry).
In my opinion, here is really the best way to pit an avocado.
Using a butter knife, cut into the avocado the normal way, cutting down until you hit the pit, and the running the knife all the way around until you come back to where you started.
Instead of twisting the pieces apart at this point, rotate the avocado and cut around the pit again, creating four quarters that are now held together by the bit.
With your hand, remove the quarter sections of the avocado, one by one.
The pit will stick to the last section, but enough of it will stick out that it will be easy to grip with your fingers and remove it.
Slice up the remaining quarters to use as needed, or smash them to make guacamole.
At work, we somehow wandered down a conversational path that took us from fruits we don’t like to eat (canned fruit cocktail) to fruits that are good frozen, and most of the ideas offered were ones I already knew.
Someone threw out the idea of frozen orange slices in drinks for the summer.
It was late on Friday afternoon. I was already looking forward to Happy Hour. Suddenly I couldn’t hear anything else anymore because frozen orange cubes in a cocktail just sounded amazing.
Repeated testing throughout the weekend proved that to be correct.
Two tips:
Remove as much of the white part of the orange as possible (it gets weird when frozen). Supreming them is an option; I just peeled them very close.
Separate the slices slightly when freezing so they don’t form a frozen orange ball.
Chili is usually a Fall season food, but this last little bit of April has been unusually cold and rainy, and the other night we really wanted comfort food.
Fun Fact: I’m not a meat eater (it’s a boring story, so we’ll skip it). Mr. SuzerSpace does eat meat, but since he really likes to cook, it’s not a deal breaker.
Meatless chili recipes tend to splinter off into mostly two groups – the types that are more bean salad with sauce, or the ones with so many special expensive ingredients that they really aren’t chili anymore.
I’ve been tweaking my own recipe for many, many years, and have come up with a version that we both really like. I think it’s a pretty good compliment that Mr. SuzerSpace will actually request this meal vs. cooking up his own version with more standard ingredients. He also likes to serve this on top of a hot dog – his own “healthyized” version of a chili dog.
There is one special ingredient in this recipe – TVP – also known as Texturized Vegetable Protein. If you go googling this, it sounds weird and scary (doomsday preppers buy it by the pallet). It looks like spray insulation, and if you don’t add anything to it when you cook it, it takes about the same.
My trick is to add layers of flavor to it at every stage – I add Soy Sauce to the water for rehydrating it, and I cook it with the onions and spices BEFORE I add in the other ingredients so it has a good amount of time to soak up all the flavors.
Personally, I buy small bags of the Bob’s Red Mill Brand (not a paid endorsement – it’s just the only version I’ve used). It’s in the health market section of my regular grocery store, or I can find it at Trader Joe’s and Sprouts.
You can leave the TVP out of the dish and it’s still good. Before I discovered TVP I made this using the veggie burger crumbles from the frozen food section. I like the texture of TVP better, it keeps forever in the cabinet, and it is much more economical.
The great thing about this (any any good chili recipe) is you can make a big batch and eat it for days, or freeze leftovers. And it scales up or down beautifully.
1cupTextured Vegetable Proteinsmall crumble version
3/4cupWarm Water
3TablespoonsSoy SauceLow Sodium
2cansBlack BeansRinsed and Drained
2cansDiced Tomatoes with Green ChiliesDrain off some, but not all of the liquid
1canGarbanzo BeansRinsed and Drained
1/2smallOnion (White or Vidalia)large dice
4-6ozFrozen Sliced Carrots
8ouncesTomato Sauce
Shredded CheeseFor topping, if desired
Sour CreamFor topping, if desired
Chili Spice Mix
1 1/2TablespoonsChili Power
3/4TeaspoonGround Cumin
1TeaspoonGarlic Powder
1TeaspoonOnion Powder
1TeaspoonPaprika
Instructions
Prepare the TVP
In a medium bowl, add TVP, the warm water and Soy Sauce.
Stir to combine (mixture should be watery).
Allow TVP to absorb liquids for about a half hour. This is a good time to chop the onion, open and drain and rinse canned items and drink a beer.
Create Chili Spice Mix
Combine all spice items in a small dish and mix gently. Set aside
Cook the TVP
In a large dutch oven, stock pot or other deep pot with a lid, saute the onion in a bit of olive oil until translucent. It is OK for the onion to brown, but do not let it burn.
Add the TVP to the cooked onion and continue cooking over medium heat. TVP won't brown like ground beef, but cook and stir in the same manner. The object is for it to warm and pick up the oniony olive oil flavors.
Sprinkle the spice mix over the cooking TVP and onion mixture, and stir to combine throughly. Be sure to not let spices burn on bottom of pot.
Create the Chili
Add all the canned ingredients and stir. If mixture is too dry, add a little water.
Continue cooking over medium heat, stirring often to keep items at bottom of pot from sticking.
Bring to a simmer, and then add frozen carrots, stir again, and then lower heat and put lid on pot.
Cook until carrots are tender, and then serve. Add topping as desired.
An obvious choice for eating healthier is to is to change out high calorie, low nutrition snacks for their better versions.
I really like crunchy snacks, but chips or crackers can go wrong really quickly. They are a lot of empty calories. There are alternatives at the store, but many are a little pricey and portion control is still tricky for me.
Enter the easy swap – healthy cereal. A little label reading goes a long way here. High fiber, vitamin enriched cereal like wheat squares or fiber twigs are two that we like. Crunchy, a little sweet but not too sugary, and very filling. I can easily eat an entire box of Cheese-Its. There’s no way I can eat an entire box of Wheat Chex.
To make it even easier to stick to the plan, I put the cereal that’s for snacking into containers on the counter, right where the crackers used to live.
