The Best Use For Avocado In Cooking

My first ever experience of avocado was way back the seventies when my mother served it up as the base for a prawn cocktail. You know the sort, a half of avocado, prawns filling the space where the stone was and all topped off with lashings of marie rose sauce......very seventies.

After the first trial with the family, my mother went to roll it out at every dinner party for the next 10 years! Not that I minded, I still love this dated classic but it's time to move on. Today I'm going to share with you what is my single most favorite way to serve avocado but before I get onto that we need to ensure that we have ripe fruit with which to start.

There's nothing worse than cutting open your avocado on the night of a dinner party and finding that the flesh is dry and woody – what a disaster. Of course the same applies if it's over ripe too. I wander around my local supermarket watch folks press the outside of an avocado believing that if they get one that's soft, then it will be ripe......wrong! Think about it. If a hundred people press the outside of an under-ripe avocado then it's going to appear soft ie. ripe, when it's not.

The simple way to test whether an avocado is ripe is to gently twist the bibble (the nobbly bit on the top where the fruit would have been attached to the tree. If when you twist, the bibble comes away in your hand, the avocado is ripe. But don't worry if you down your local supermarket shopping for a party and there are no ripe avocados, just buy what's there and provided you've got a couple of days to spare everything will be just fine.

When you get home, place your avocados in a brown paper bag with a banana a leave them overnight in a wooden drawer. Bananas emit ethylene and this ripens the fruit – ever wondered why fruit in a bowl with bananas appear to go off quicker? Well its the bananas.

Test your fruit every half day and when the bibble comes free, you know that you've got perfectly ripe avocado.

Now for one of the best backyard barbecue menu ideas ever, you've got your ripe avocado so what are you going to do with it? Well my recommendation is to peel and remove the stone, cut it up into half inch cubes and then to wrap it in streaky bacon. Avocado and bacon bites.

You can then either skewer it or use a BBQ basket and the next thing is to grill it until the bacon is lightly crispy. Don't ask me what it is but avocado and bacon were just made for each other and the first time that I served these up as an appetizer at my BBQ party you would not believe the speed at which they were devoured! I made loads and I couldn't cook them fast enough, I only got to eat one!

So if you're looking for a great way to use avocado in your cooking then try this, but don't do like my mother. Now that I've served this for her it's taken over from the prawn cocktail so if you're ever invited to my parents for a barbecue in the next 10 years, avocado and bacon bites is sure to be on the menu.