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Monday, July 2, 2012

Avocado's seven pleasures

I prepare our dinner salads virtually 365 evenings a year. I use avocado often and its many pleasures haven't diminished. Its taste isn't even necessarily the chief pleasure.
    The first pleasure, for me, is the heft of the uncut avocado. For its size, it's a bit heavier than the eye assumes. The fruit's flesh is dense, its seed large.
    Second is the delicate but unmistakable yielding of a ripe avocado to some small pressure applied with the fingertips. I like to use all five fingers—just their tips. It's a bit of a disappointment if none of my store of avocados yields and we have to forgo avocado for the evening. Once or twice I've gone ahead in impatience to use an unripe avocado, but its remaining pleasures are diminished, not least the gustatory.
    Third is the toughness of the skin. The avocado pictured (from this evening) was a bit overripe, so that even the lesser pressure of a sharp knife ruffled somewhat the flesh adjacent to the cut. Let's call the pleasure of a sharp knife's quick, clean cut part of the third pleasure.
    Fourth is the visual beauty of the inner flesh, its spectrum of yellow-greens, its moistness, its smooth texture perceived visually.
    I was actually using the second half of the avocado from last night, and I had already removed the half's skin, halved and quartered it, and chunked two eighths before I felt the irresistible urge to get out a camera—the nearest to hand being that of my Droid. I should have futzed over the initial shot, to get the two remaining two eighths closer together and show less cutting board. Or better yet, I should have thought of a photo sooner—when I still had all four eighths. (Have you ever reflected that "should" doesn't work with respect to the past, and very often not with respect to the future either?)
    Fifth is the kinetic pleasure of slicing very thin, lengthwise slices and laying them atop the bed of lettuce, cucumber slices, cauliflower florets...
    Sixth is the visual pleasure of seeing the array of slices. Or chunks. Tonight, as I've already indicated, I chunked eighths. The reasons for this was that my wife had actually already prepared everything else, and did so in a big bowl for tossing. Dropping on the chunks was the last addition before salad dressing.
    Seventh, gustation. I don't believe I've ever used that noun before, but it's perfect. The act of tasting. And half that act for avocado is the tongue's feel of what may well be ultimate smoothness.
    The seven enlivening pleasures?

No salad dressing has yet been poured. Tossing has not begun.
In fact, tossing repositioned most of the chunks beneath the other ingredients.

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