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Smoothie Sunday: Guavacado Smoothie

Full disclosure – this is not the most attractive looking smoothie I’ve ever made.  In fact it’s probably one of the least attractive ones.  Like, I was actively disappointed in how not good it looked.  But fortunately looks aren’t everything.  Taste is important too, and luckily it tastes good.  While I’d had guava juice in stuff before, I’d never actually eaten just guava fruit before, but I found them when I was at the store picking up an avocado and thus this smoothie was born.  The fact that the words “guava” and “avocado” blend together so well is merely coincidence.

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What you’ll need.

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Cheat Code: Egg-less Avocado Chocolate Chip Cookies

I realize this is now our third chocolate chip cookie recipe on the blog, but well, we really like chocolate chip cookies.  While the chocolate chip cookie recipe using cream cheese instead of eggs came about out of necessity, this recipe was developed strictly out of curiosity.  I remembered from an old episode of Good Eats that Alton Brown said that avocados are actually kind of similar to eggs in terms of fat content so that got me to wondering if avocado could also replace eggs in cookies.  And I was right!  The cookies ended up with a slightly different flavor than regular chocolate chip cookies, but nothing that can really be pin-pointed to avocado.  Even skeptics will enjoy these cookies.  They’re also some of the most cakey chocolate chip cookies I’ve ever had, so if that’s your favorite type of cookie, then these are for you.

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Quick Recipe: Avocado Breakfast Toast

Most mornings I’m satisfied having a bagel, cereal, or oatmeal for breakfast. But some mornings I just wake up wanting more. When that happens I usually turn to eggs. They’re yummy, full of protein, and fast to make. But eating just scrambled or over easy eggs with buttered toast can get boring. That means it’s time to mix things up! On the particular morning that I came up with this I happened to have half of an avocado lying around that I wanted to use before it went bad, so I proceeded from there.

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Cheat Code: Saving Avocados

We’ve touched upon the somewhat unstable nature of avocados in the past on this blog. Once you cut into an avocado you have a limited amount of time to use it before it turns brown and unusable. This happens because of the enzyme polyphenol oxidase in the flesh of the avocado. When it’s exposed to oxygen polyphenol oxidase changes the chemical structure of the avocado’s flesh and increases the amount of melanins. So the same pigments that cause you to get a tan in the summer also cause your guacamole to go kaput. While it’s easy to finish up guacamole before it goes bad (because, you know, it’s so delicious), there are times when you want just some avocado, but don’t want the rest to go to waste. I usually encounter this problem when I want to put some avocado on a sandwich since I don’t make sandwiches large enough to use an entire avocado on. So I’m left with half of an avocado that’s now a ticking time bomb. Avocados are kind of expensive, so you should try your best to make sure you use that other half and don’t just end up throwing it out. How does one do this?
You could buy one of those “avocado saver” things I’ve seen various places.

It's like a sandal for your avocado I guess.

It’s like a sandal for your avocado I guess.

I have no idea if things like this actually work though. A quick scan of reviews on Amazon.com gives a pretty mixed bag of results.

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Pizza Lab #32: Nacho Pizza

I think we can all agree that nachos (real nachos, not the kind from 7-11 that are just chips with fake cheese poured over them) are delicious.  But they can be a bit messy to eat.  Your hands can get dirty, and you can drop toppings anywhere along the trip between the plate to your mouth.  Well, what if I told you that we have found a way to make nachos less messy to eat, but still just as delicious?  Impossible you say?  Nothing is impossible with the power of…pizza!  That’s right.  We combined nachos and pizza and came up with both the neatest nachos you’ve ever eaten, and also one of the yummiest pizzas.

We’ve been on a bit of a nacho kick lately here at PCFG headquarters ever since we discovered how easy it is to make homemade tortilla chips.  That’s mainly where the inspiration for this pizza came from.  There are some challenges, and always some risk when combining a food that stands on its own with another (lest we forget the Chinese food pizza, which to this day is probably our least successful pizza lab).  But after some careful planning we decided on the best approach to this pizza, and it ended up working really well!

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