Avocados

Recently I was out on a small bicycle ride in my area and I noticed this lovely sign. I especially like the implication that other kinds of theft are not so bad (?)...

Fortunately I had the fortune of living in a house with an avocado tree in the back yard for a couple of years. This way I didn't have to resort to thieving to secure myself quite a number of avocados. I ate them in salads, in sandwiches, just plain (possibly with balsemico vinegar), in mexican fare in general or as guacamole in particular. I never really did hear of any dishes that incorporated heated avocado, but maybe they just get too soft.

I didn't know much (any at all) about avocado trees until I suddenly lived right next to one, so I'll take this time to tell you a little about it in case you never had the opportunity.

The one in my yard flowered only every other year, in June, and only for a relatively short time - which is why I only have pictures of the buds and the new fruits but not the flowers themselves. The tree brings forth new fruits continually throughout the 2 year period between flowering. At times there can be quite a number of avocados, but as they don't ripen until picked one can pretty much control the harvesting by picking them at a suitable rate.
Although as my pictures show I sometimes went and got quite a number of them.

When picked the fruits are green and quite hard. They need to sit for a number of days to ripen. When they are ripe then skin turns dark and they soften considerably. This requires patience - and/or planning: pick the fruits a couple of weeks before you want to eat them. The ripening is, as for some other fruits - including apples and bananas - regulated by ethylene. As ethylene is quite volatile, the ripening is helped by placing the avocados in a tightly shut paperbag. A common trick is to put a well ripened banana in the same bag because ripe bananas contain/release higher levels of ethylene than do avocados, thereby accelerating the ripening procedure. You should still expect the process to take some 9 days or so.

I remember hearing years ago that one should be careful with storing apples and bananas together since apples have higher levels of ethylene than do bananas - the possible result being a super-ripening of your bananas. With this in mind I thought maybe it was worth a shot to put an apple in a brown paper bag with some avocados, but I have to report that this did not seem to be appreciably different from using bananas (with the possible exception that afterwards the apple hasn't gone nearly as soft as the bananas tend to).