Chocolate and what??

Chocolate avocado mousse. It is a thing, apparently. And not just a thing as in weird recipes you find on wacky websites - no, this was in a genuine published cookery book. Entitled, since you ask, River Cottage Light & Easy by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Although I'm sure you can find it on any number of wacky websites too.

So I had a couple of avocados that had been sitting in the fridge for ages, and I was convinced they were about to dissolve into slushy puddles if I didn't use them soon. Of course, one of them turned out to be rock hard. Another root in the fridge produced about 100ml of pureed tinned pears, left from an experiment in making pear and elderflower ice lollies. So, into the food processor went the one ripe avocado, 3 tbsp of cocoa powder, the pear mush and a couple of teaspoons of honey. One good whizz later, it had amalgamated into a pretty good mousse-like mixture that tasted much more like chocolate than avocado. Success!

Come dessert time, each of us got a little cupful. Each of us? Uh-huh. You can see where this is going, can't you? Want to see what a baby can do with two spoonfuls of chocolate mousse?

This.

And this.

How about this?

Man, this is good.

Don't forget about me!

Um... success?

Comments

Growing things

For those of you who are interested in my attempts at balcony gardening, I thought I'd update you a little. For those who aren't, don't skip this post. You may find something else of interest. Apart from the ever-present herbs, tomatoes and cayenne peppers are on the go this year. The peppers are really on the go - we went away for a week and came back to find them twice the size as when we left. Now they're producing fruit which is growing at a similarly rapid rate, though none has ripened to red yet. I realised I should have given you some kind of scale, so I just went out and measured. They're about 22 cm long, or 8 1/2 inches for you non-metric types. I may have to find out how to dry peppers if they all ripen at once. A couple of tomato plants are looking pretty healthy and beginning to flower. A few died; one, apparently, by being eaten whole by a bird, a trouble I've never had before. I had two seedlings left so used those as replacements, b...

Hosting Thanksgiving

OK, I have to confess. This will be a very boring Thanksgiving story. Everything went right and it was a lovely day. For an interesting story you need a few things going wrong. I heard a couple of interesting stories this year - like the one about mis-measuring bourbon to go in the stuffing. Apparently if you put far too much in, all the alcohol doesn't boil off. Or the one about going to cook dinner at an Asian friend's house, and discovering at the last minute that she doesn't have any baking trays, and it's quite difficult to roast a turkey in a wok. But as I said, we didn't have so much as a lumpy gravy panic. Where's my food??? We're working on it, baby! So what do you want to know? Well, it was my first Thanksgiving dinner cooked on American soil. Back when I was free and single and shared a house with lots of people who liked to eat, I got into the habit of celebrating the American feast for a few years, until the...

On having an accent

Back in the olden days, when it was a major undertaking to get from, say, Bristol to London, or even Bristol to Weston-super-Mare, and so most people didn't bother, it is said that you could place people within 10 miles or so by their accent. Now that we've built motorways and everyone spends their days whizzing up and down them, you have to go a bit further to get your accent noticed, but moving 3700 miles from Bristol to Texas certainly does the trick. Of course, I don't really have an accent - I speak quite normally, thank you very much, but everyone else talks funny around here, so naturally I stand out as different. It's been a strange experience to be marked out the minute I open my mouth. About the second thing everyone says to me is, "You're not from around here" or, "Where are you from?" Even though we talk the same language (well, almost), the way I speak says I'm a newbie, a stranger, something exotic. Fortunately the thir...

Martha's Marvellous Munchies

Search This Blog