Backyard Guacamole

                                                           
















There is guacamole and then there is guacamole. There is the kind you get in the supermarket in round, plastic tubs. This is plastic guacamole that has the slippery feel and taste of the container it comes in. It is a little too pea green, face-foundation pureed, and useful only for a first rate Mexican food emergency. No guacamole should ever represent such panicked urgency.

Then there is kitchen-made guacamole. You hope the avocado is ripe enough. The knife neatly slashes the pit and is ejected into a bowl for puncture with toothpicks, water emersion and sprouting later on in the dark of the cabinet below the kitchen sink. It is masticated by a fork and doused with a shot of salsa. In the end, it will work on tostadas, or as the final dollop on a taco.

But backyard guacamole is in a class by itself. It is the only guacamole fit for a giant bowl, situated beside an overflowing mountain of organic blue corn tostado chips. That is because it is concocted in a way no other guacamole is created. It starts with a fresh picked avocado, so fat and heavy that it has fallen to the ground. Your thumb tells you it is ready, -and it is the size of a small football, with the weight of a smooth, round baseball-sized boulder. You carry it in the crook of your arm, pushing aside the Florida palm fronds and sheaths of long grassy plants, until you make your way to the lemon tree. It is short and gnarled, and the lemon-scent permeates the humid air beneath the tree like a tent, before you even pick one. The lemon is sunny with a few tiny tints of lime color. You hold it in your palm. The garden patch of tomatoes overflows with stemmy green, - and red orbs like a Christmas tree. Carefully, you detach a tomato from its rough solid lifeline. A quick hand-grab of cilantro from the herbs growing in pots along the perimeter of the back porch is carried into the kitchen.

Now you have what you need. The football-sized, Florida avocado, so unlike its small richer California counterpart, needs a mixing bowl all to itself. Its more watery content, when ripe, mashes with a fork into a textured bright-green landscape which bits of chopped tomato, the extra juices drained, and folded in, adding contrast and flavor. The lemon is neatly halved and squeezed, the lemon seeds delicately removed with a teaspoon. A pinch of sea salt and a garnish of chopped cilantro and backyard guacamole becomes a sublime reality.