I’m getting into making more things around the house, but not so much the honey-do list as much as our meals and essential oil blends and oil lamps from light bulbs and liqueurs. Well, today, I had my first major setback.
A few weeks ago, I boldly went where few men have gone before and made a liqueur out of one of my favorite foods - avocado. It’s been my opinion for several years now that avocados in the US need to break free of the shackles of guacamole and salads and cross over into desserts and tasty beverages. So, when I found a recipe for creme d’avocaat at homedistiller.org, I had to try it. I whipped up some lovely avocado pulp, added lots of sugar and lemon juice (to keep the ‘cados from browning), blended with diluted white rum, and stirred in an egg yolk to emulsify the whole thing. The results were, frankly, a little confusing.
I loved the taste. The sweet, smooth avocado dazzled in the foreground, followed by a strong rummy bite. The color was a radiant Ectoplasm green which I could totally live with, but the so-called drink was so very thick! It was more like an avocado rum pudding. So, I shopped it around a little to get others’ opinions. I tried to feed it to my dozing wife, but she was not happy to have rummy avocado custard spoon fed to her while she was unconscious, so she formed an immediate prejudice against it - a wholly unfair one, don’t you think? My cubicle buddy at work didn’t try it, but after my description, he called me, as he usually does, a nut. He just doesn’t get my creative impulses. My friends Joe and Jon thought it was interesting, but they both felt it might be better received in a slightly more defined phase of matter. Solid or liquid, maybe, but not this brilliant green plasma. I took their advice to heart and threw the goo in the ice cream maker, but, as I should have recalled, it takes a lot to freeze alcohol, and I got nowhere. The sweet fatty nectar would have to remain a plasma. Reluctantly, I threw the unfazed treat into the refrigerator to cool its proverbial heels. My brother and his wife came down for the weekend, so we had dinner at my parents on Saturday. I told them of my seemingly failed experiment and suffered much ridicule – something about putting avocado chunks into GrapeNuts whilst visiting my brother’s apartment a few months ago also came up.
Well, today, I found a mixed drink recipe for advocaat – the eggy variant of crème d’avocaat – called a Snowball. It called for two jiggers of advocaat poured over ice then doused with and stirred into lemon-lime soda. Yummy! I took my mason jar of crème d’avocaat out of the penalty box and legged it back to my parents for dinner with a heaping side dish of vindication. They would soon eat their words and wash them down with Fresca Snowballs. As soon, as I got to my parents, I whipped out the jar, poured some over ice, mixed in the Fresca, and voila! My ugly green duckling was transformed into a creamy, refreshing, delicious mixer. I passed my drink to my wife, who admitted it was pretty good, and to my mom, who didn’t really want to drink any until after dinner but still thought it tasted alright. Then, tragedy struck. I closed the jar and picked it up to put it in the fridge, but my hands were too wet! The jar slipped from my grasp and shattered on the tile floor of the kitchen! My vindication oozed in a green puddle across the floor and shards of glass. But, I still had half of my Snowball, so I drank that and plotted my next batch of crème d’avocaat in relatively good spirits.