1001 kitchen tips #24 - The avocado felt a right ‘nana

They say there are 3 things guaranteed in life - death, taxes, and that which ever queue you get into at the supermarket it will be the wrong one.

I say there are 4 things you can guarantee. The fourth is that whenever you need a ripe avocado for a special occasion you can always guarantee wherever you go, however many places you try they will be all as hard a bullets. Sure enough it came to obtaining a couple of avocadoes for sushi, and I could have sworn the hunting brigade had been in everywhere and swapped lovely ripe avocadoes for avocado shaped and coloured bullets.

Luckily, it also coincided with a trip to banoffee city.

Banoffee pies were on the schedule so we had a box of a hundred sitting waiting.

Bananas are my saviour. Many a time they got me out of similar bullet like moments in the Claridges larder. When you need ripe avocadoes for 400 people in 2 days time and all the vegetable suppliers in London have avocado shaped bullets you have a serious crisis. But this is an old wives tale that works. The gas that bananas give off ripens anything very quickly. Put them together in a brown paper bag in the airing cupboard and the next day it will have ripened considerably. In my case, as I had so many, I used to put them in a tray on rice. The rice both cushions them (preventing them from bruising), and when you put it in a warm place (in desperation on the racks above the ovens as they cooled down overnight) the rice retains the heat, which helps the ripening process. I would place a few bananas on and cling film the top, so the banana-gas would get to work. It would work every time.

This time, as it was just 2 and they were sat on 100 bananas, and it was relatively warm anyway, I had a hunch they would be OK as they were. It worked. Luckily. And I made some great last minute sushi.

Ref:

Banoffee pie

Sushi