Bashed Avocado with Cottage Cheese? Yes Please!

Cooking has never been much of a forte of mine. It’s a very complicated enterprise I would say. Why would professionals for the art exist if it were so easy? For example, if I desire a candlestick, I visit my local tallow chandler, I don’t magic one up by myself – I can’t. Hail consumerism. That was my logic. All my life it was. But not anymore. Enter bashed avocado mixed with cottage cheese.

Like so many of us it was the insurmountable might of the pandemic that brought me to my knees and ushered in a new age of food practices. It was late one evening that, much to my astonishment, I found that I felt finally tired of pizza deliveries. What was I to do in this never before contemplated reality? That was when I had the realisation – ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE. If I could exhaust my lust for pizza then maybe – just maybe – I could do this cooking malarkey. Perhaps it wasn’t an impossible pursuit.

With this spasm of optimistic inspiration I marched down the yellow carpeted staircase to the pale wooden panelled kitchen. On the sofa my sister looked up inquisitively at me from her fashion magazine. She must have smelled that something deeply unnatural was about to take place. Her eyebrows furrowed a little, but like all cool young people she pretended to be uninterested and returned to her own affairs.

I swung the cream fridge door open with aplomb. So this is what the inside of a fridge looks like, I scowled scratching my whiskery chin as my pupils darted about it. Hmm… My mind wavered back to pizza. NO! Be strong old boy. I gritted my teeth. I’d come this far. I could do it. I would do it!

Finally I realised my eyes kept on coming back to one thing. A packet of wholehearted herby-filled looking Cumberland sausages. That should do.

‘Dear sister,’ I called, ‘Do sausages go in the oven or the frying pan?’

She looked up with an air of incredulity, ‘You can’t be serious?!’

Grimacing I shook off her disservice and gingerly got a frying pan out. I dared not suffer the embarrassment of asking her what setting and temperature an oven should go on for sausages – the stove seemed a bit more basic.

With the sausages thrown in the frying pan my attention turned to the issue of an accompaniment. Leaving it to fate I hoped the sausages wouldn’t burn, or worse still set on fire, whilst I marauded around the kitchen in search of something suitable to compliment my main event.

It was at this moment that I chanced upon my greatest invention to date. But at this point I didn’t even realise it yet. For my initial intention was simply to have the avocado and cottage cheese separately on the side to accompany the sausages. In my blissful innocence I duly deposited a portion of them each on the white china surface of my plate.

Still acutely aware of my sausages, and more concerned for their wellbeing than anything else, I rushed over to the frying pan to turn them round on their side a bit. They seemed pleasantly singed. The house hadn’t burned down. Everything seemed to be going hunky-dory. Maybe I could be a chef, I pondered haughtily.

Before long the sausages appeared perfectly cooked. With lines of hot golden brown in between parallel lines of sizzling beige, and decorated sporadically all over with those flavoursome green flakes of herb, they looked pretty good to me.

Without wasting any precious time I scooped the sausages onto my plate and sat down to eat at the hickory brown kitchen table. As I cut into the Cumberlands a jet of hot steam erupted out of the severed meat. Certainly it was too hot to eat immediately. And so I arrived at my fateful moment of unintentional genius. Impatiently I started to squash the avocado under my fork until it was reduced to nothing less than a velvety green pulp. Then, avocado conquered, I couldn’t help myself but start playing with the cottage cheese. The next thing I knew I was mixing and mashing them both together. Slowly a creamy green invention was being born in front of my eyes!

Huh, I shrugged still nonplussed as I looked down upon my plate. Ecstasy was so close now but I still didn’t have a clue that it was about to hit me. Wiping a splodge of the bashed avocado with cottage cheese mixture onto the first piece of Cumberland sausage I finally took my maiden mouthful. My eyes widened; colourful fireworks started popping off inside my head; and my mouth tingled as it absorbed the delectable heavenly flavours. Eureka!