Crafts

You’ll have to forgive me… I’m still reminiscing about evo’12 and all the great fun we had in Park City.  I’ve already told you about the food styling and photography class that I ADORED, taught by the White on Rice Couple. Another class that I attended was hosted by the California Avocado Commission and it was CRAZY in many ways. Almost as crazy as the guacamole recipe that my team came up with that night.  But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

First off, the class was at the top of one of the mountains in a small little restaurant at The Canyons Resort. Second, we had no power. Everything was being run on generators, and it was a bit dicey.  You had to ride a chair lift up to the restaurant and if the generators stopped… so did you.  We did the whole three hour class by candle light and cell phone flash lights.  It was a HOOT!! Our hosts for the evening were Mary Sue and Susan, the Two Hot Tamales. Both ladies have been on Top Chef Masters along with having their very own Food Network show a few years ago. They are also very successful restaurateurs and cookbook authors. Talk about champs and two ladies that I would LOVE to hang out with more.

img source /// cafe johnsonia

We started the evening with a Top Chef challenge of our very own.  We had to come up with a non-traditional guacamole recipe with a team of three other bloggers. There was a table set-up with about 30-40 different ingredients that we could use.  The challenge that night, was trying to figure out what the ingredients were in the dark.  We pulled out our iPhone flashlights and went to work.  My team decided to make an Italian style guacamole with these roughly ingredients.

• avocado
• garlic
• onion
• capers
• red wine vinegar
• sundried tomatoes
• bacon

Now, being a guacamole purest I was a little skeptical, but it turned out aaaamazing. It was so fun to see what everyone came up with.  Other teams had tropical style guac with pineapple and passion fruit, another team had bad a@* guacamole {I think they actually won the competition.} We had breakfast guacamole with hard boiled egg and bacon in it. You name it, some one created it.  It was so fun!

Since then, all of us bloggers have been chatting on Twitter and decided we all needed to recreate our crazy concoctions and post them on our blogs for you guys to try out. So… Here you have my modified version of our Guacamole Italiano!

Guacamole Italiano Crostini Recipe

2 ripe avocados

2 cloves of garlic

2 tablespoons of shallot

2 tablespoons of sundried tomato pesto

2 tablespoons of capers

2 tablespoons of parmesan cheese

2 teaspoons of red wine vinegar

salt & pepper to taste

Cut avocados in half, discard seed and remove flesh into a small bowl and set aside. Finely dice the garlic on a cutting board, sprinkle with course salt and mash into a paste with the back of your chef’s knife.

Finely mince the shallot and place in the avocado bowl with the garlic, sundried tomato pesto, capers, parmesan cheese, red wine vinegar, salt and pepper.

With the back of a fork gently mash the mixture together. At this point it’s your choice. Do you like your guacamole chucky or smooth? I’m an in between kind of girl.  I like a good smooth, yet a little chunky guac. Serve with crusty crostini on the side… This is Italian anyways. It just seams wrong to serve it with tortilla chips.

Soooo, what do you think? Is this something you would try. Maybe you would like to make up your own style of guacamole? That’s the lovely thing about avocados… They are a lovely blank canvas. They are like the veggie worlds answer to bacon… Almost everything is better with avocados, don’t you think?

Here are a few more of the crazy guac concoctions for you guys to check out from that night!