Half Baked: Guacamole by the Ceviche Method

This, the first of two recipes we will provide for you for this weekend’s festivities, is even easier than you think! Yes you can! USA, USA!

Even if you don’t like football, and have not watched a single match this season, America demands that you will gather with friends on Sunday and drink beer and watch a game. If only to see the commercials. Really, it’s the least you can do. The advertising agency spends the whole year selflessly making all our lives better. This is their big night. They’ve spent so much money-$2.6 million for every 30 seconds, more than they’ve ever spent before-that you owe it to them, we all owe it them, to watch. And you must do this in company. And gamble money on things you don’t understand. You will be drunk. Suck it up and enjoy.

Besides the money you will never see again, how else should you contribute to the party that it is your solemn duty as an American to attend? How about make guacamole? You will be popular. You will be even more popular if you follow these instructions, because this is the best way to make guacamole. It is called “The Ceviche Method.” (So named by someone who is maybe a bit too proud of his one original culinary discovery.)

First, do not make the guacamole at your own home and bring it to the party covered in cellophane. Your guacamole is not a toilet seat at a high-school party. It is to eat fresh. Make it there. Surely your host or hosts has or have a knife and a bowl and a place to cut and mash things in his or her or their kitchen. And salt, you don’t need to bring salt. Bring the other ingredients: one avocado for every two people who will be at the party, slightly more onions than that, more garlic, jalapeno peppers and cilantro than you think you’d want, and limes. Lots of those, too. Lots and lots of limes. The limes are key. You start with them.

Cut open your limes and squeeze the juice into the bowl. Make a nice deep pool in the bottom of the bowl. Or a bath. An acid bath. You will be soaking all your spicy, bad-breath making ingredients in an acid bath to soften their potentially overpowering flavors and save the party from collective halitosis.

Now, chop up the onions, garlic, jalapeno peppers and cilantro. (Oh, seriously, take the seeds out of the jalapeno peppers first.) Chop everything into very small pieces. Even smaller than regulation-size casino dice. Do you like the movie Goodfellas? If you do (meaning, if you’re not a terrible person), maybe you’d like to slice the garlic into pieces so thin they’d liquefy in a pan with just a little oil. It’s a good system. Even though you won’t be using a pan or oil.

You’re cooking with lime-just like how people who live in very hot places, like, say, Costa Rica, which you may have visited many years ago, are able to enjoy the “raw” fish in ceviche. Perhaps you were hesitant to try this foreign dish, this raw fish being served to you in a plastic cup, that which looked like it had been sitting unrefrigerated for some time in such a hot place. Until perhaps someone smarter than you explained that the acid in the lime juice (and maybe in the jalepeno peppers, too?) actually cooked the fish-denaturing the proteins, if you want to get scientific about it. Costa Rico is beautiful, isn’t it?

As you finish chopping each ingredient, dump it into the bowl.

Besides Goodfellas, do you also like the television show “Top Chef”? Despite your frequent annoyance with regular judge Gail Simmons and the way she always says, “This could use a little more acid,” about every dish she tastes, even when she could just as easily say “lime” or “lemon” or “vinegar” or whatever? Like she’s some kind of scientist or Deadhead? Are you surprised to find yourself using the word so much right now?

Once all the flavorful ingredients are in their lime-juice bath, go away. Go back to the television and watch more commercials. Consider buying something. Come on, someone’s going to have to get us out of this recession! Or make a bet about something else. You don’t need to like or even understand football to have a good time. Drink beer. Fast. Chug. Faster. Chug it. Go! Go! Go!

After five or ten minutes and beers, go back into the kitchen and chop up all the avocados and put them into the bowl with the lime juice and the no-longer-raw onions, garlic, jalapenos peppers and cilantro. Mosh everything up with a fork. Salt to taste. You are done. You are popular. Explain the miraculous secret when anyone asks how you have made guacamole so flavorful and delicious and with such a pleasant aftertaste.