I recently took my mom to Shreveport, LA for a quick girls’ getaway, and in a thrift shop, I found a cookbook with some of the most heinous recipes I’ve seen to date. So naturally, I had to have it. The Favorite Recipes of Home Economics Teachers Cookbook was written circa 1970 and includes such gems as Molded Cole Slaw Ring, Corned Beef Salad Mold, Tuna Gumbo Salad, and Top Hat Raisin-Lobster Curry. Needless to say, I won’t be visiting any Home Ec teachers’ houses for dinner anytime soon.
I had a free Saturday afternoon since my husband was working, so I found a trio of avocado recipes that looked…interesting. I should mention at this point that I DO NOT LIKE avocados. No idea what possessed me.
Not sure why I bother including the ingredients in these posts, since literally no one but me is making this crap, but:
Avocado Fruit Freeze
1 large avocado
2 Tablespoons lemon juice
1 3-oz. package cream cheese, softened
2 Tablespoons sugar
¼ cup mayonnaise
¼ teaspoon salt
1 1-lb. can of pears, drained and diced
¼ c. well drained chopped maraschino cherries
½ cup whipping cream, whipped (or the canned whipped cream)
Avocado Salad
4 Tablespoons olive oil
4 teaspoons fresh lime juice
5 drops of hot sauce
1/8 teaspoon pepper
Dash of cayenne
¼ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon celery salt
2 teaspoons sugar
1 to 2 oranges, sectioned and diced
1 grapefruit, pulled apart haphazardly and chopped so it looks like you didn’t completely destroy it when you peeled it
2 to 4 avocados, halved
Maraschino cherries (optional)
Avocado Pineapple Salad
2 avocados
2 Tablespoons lemon juice
Lettuce
1 cup well-drained crushed pineapple
1 8-oz. package cream cheese
Dash of salt
Pimiento strips
Lemon slices
French dressing
For the Avocado Fruit Freeze, you start by dicing the avocado. Get it all up under your fingernails. I’ll wait…
Then sprinkle lemon juice on the avocado. Blend your cream cheese, some more lemon juice, sugar, mayo, and salt, and pretend you let the cream cheese soften. Get upset when it doesn’t blend properly because it’s still cold. Add your avocado to the cream cheese mixture, mix in the pears and cherries, then fold in the whipped cream straight out of the can. Pour this mixture into a vessel that you can freeze and leave it in the freezer for 6 hours. Defrost 15 minutes before serving. When you’re done, this looks like chunky avocado ice cream. Fantastic. (gags)
Next, I made the Avocado Salad (hold the pineapple). In this recipe, you combine the first 8 ingredients to make a spicy dressing for the fruit. Instead of 5 drops of hot sauce, I lost control of the bottle and ended up with like a tablespoon of hot sauce in my dressing. C’est la vie. We’re eating it anyway, bring on the antacid. Combine the orange and grapefruit pieces – my grapefruit looked like the dog peeled it for me because my grapefruit peeling skills are seriously lacking – and toss with the dressing. Fill each avocado cavity with the orange-grapefruit mixture and garnish with cherries. I cannot explain exactly how cheery, colorful, and vaguely sinister this dish is. I sent a picture of this to Mark, and he was quick to make other plans for the evening.
Finally, I made the Avocado-Pineapple Salad. This was the most confusing of the three recipes because you start by slicing the avocado in rings. What they don’t tell you is how to get the pit out of these rings neatly without squirting avocado all over the kitchen. I ended up with exactly 1 avocado’s worth of “rings” to use for my salad, and the rest was stuck to the counter, the floor, the cabinets, and the oven. Sprinkle lemon juice on your avocado rings and place them on a salad plate on top of your lettuce. Combine pineapple, cream cheese, and salt. Stir angrily because your cream cheese is too cold again. Fill centers of avocado rings with the pineapple mixture and garnish with pimiento and lemon. Serve with French dressing and ask yourself why you thought this was a good idea in the first place.
During the assembly process, the dogs enjoyed the pineapple and pears but were very suspicious of the avocado and left it in squished pieces on the floor for me to pick up. My daughter eyed me from the playroom while she ate crackers and refused to even come into the kitchen. The Husband came home after all 3 recipes were done, and he was happy we finally had avocados in the house, but “not like this”.
Upon trying the 2 salads, we agreed there were just too many d*&m flavors, and none of them were good. The grapefruit overpowered the citrus-orange salad (which miraculously wasn’t spicy at all) and the French dressing overpowered the pineapple one – and that was an improvement. The avocado was flavorless mush underneath both of them. All in all, a terrible combo on both accounts. They were so bad we cry-laughed for a good ten minutes before promptly depositing them in the trash.
The fruit freeze went a little down a little bit better, but my husband described it as “mayonnaise-flavored ice cream”. So, you know, a nice refreshing summer treat. Thank goodness I only made half of each recipe and kept some avocados to make guacamole as penance. Here's a picture of the dogs sleeping after they begged their little hearts out as a palate cleanser:
Final Rating: Home Ec teachers, I trusted you. What do you have to say for yourselves??
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