reflections on guacamole
Hello and welcome to the April edition of my author newsletter! For more info on what this newsletter is, see the about page. For more info on who I am, check out my website.
So lately I’ve been seeing a lot of memes that are like, “March was so loooong and April was so shoooort,” and you know what? I AGREE. It feels like just yesterday I was cobbling together my March newsletter whilst suffering from a Tiger King hangover and adjusting to life in quarantine, and now—poof! A full month of isolation has come and gone. Tank’s expression in the below banner image pretty much sums up how I feel ‘bout it.
what I’ve been reading
I desperately needed some escapism this month, so I did something I wouldn’t normally do: allowed myself to read a beach novel in April. I know, right? I’m living on the edge during this pandémique!
The book was Here’s to Us by Elin Hilderbrand (a fellow Little, Brown author!) and it was a delight. I already said this on Instagram, but Hilderbrand’s novels always swirl around in my head for long after I’ve finished reading them. This story was about the family (including three spicy ex-wives) of a recently-deceased celebrity chef as they converge at his Nantucket beach house to honor his memory and figure out some weird shit he left in his will. It had everything I expect from good commercial fiction: breezy writing, tight pacing, messy characters, family drama, sex, scandal, betrayal—all with a huge heart at the center. And OMG, the food descriptions made me drool. Just thinking about them right now is giving me a desperate craving for seafood. (And summertime. And a world in which both of those things can be enjoyed in public.)
a brief history of my sordid relationship with guacamole
Speaking of food! Remember that scene in the first Sex and the City movie when Samantha was eating homemade chips and guac on a random weekday afternoon while checking out her hot neighbor’s peen as he took an outdoor shower? Of course you do. Me? I’ve always had two thoughts when watching that scene: 1) “Yep, I’m gay!” and 2) “What kind of bitch has the time to make homemade chips and guac on a random weekday afternoon?”
I can now tell you that the answer to #2 is me during quarantine—literally every weekday afternoon over the past few weeks. Life is so full of plot twists!
Before I get into how this new ritual came to be, I should explain that I have a very complicated past with guacamole. Picture it: Rocky Hill, Connecticut. The summer of 2008. I’m a skinny underage bitch working as a waiter at Mexican chain restaurant On the Border. One of OTB’s most popular menu items? Guacamole Live! Exclamation point theirs. (Lol, for once it’s not mine.) As its name suggests, this dish involved the making of guacamole—right in front of you, at your table—live! It was an appetizer and an experience.
Guac Live! was a real hoot for the customers, but a fucking nightmare for me. I mean, I was a shitty waiter to begin with. Staying on top of my section was hard! All that order-taking and drink-refilling and food-running. But Guac Live! made the job a zillion times harder. It required me to put everything on hold, assemble various ramekins of guac ingredients (you know—whole avocados, tomato, jalapeño, cilantro, red onion, lime, a pinch of salt) onto a tray, plop that tray right in front of the fuckers who ordered it, and make awkward conversation with them while mashing up all the ingredients together until they resembled the picture on the menu. It was positively grotesque!
I remember one time a customer asked me, “Do you hate it when people order the Guacamole Live?” I could see in his eyes that he wanted me to say, “Of course not! Please order what you want and don’t feel bad.” But instead I told him the truth: “Yep. Guac Live is a real pain in the ass.” He was crestfallen, but I had never felt more alive. Don’t ask for the truth if you can’t handle it, bitch! And like, whatever. He still got his guacamole; it was just made thirty feet away, in the kitchen, by someone who wasn’t me.
Anyway! All of this is to explain why I’ve vehemently avoided making guacamole ever since that summer. So many negative associations, you know? The mere act of smushing an avocado has been triggering for over a decade now. The whole thing is very Saving Private Ryan. Guacamol-P-TSD.
But then! A few weeks ago I was forced to buy a package of 80 corn tortillas because I wanted to make tacos, and this 80-pack was all Stop & Stop had left. So I was like, “WTF am I gonna do with all these extra corn tortillas?”
And then one thing led to another and I decided to cut them into chips and slather them with oil and bake them — and OMG — they were delicious. And warm! So much better than bagged tortilla chips!
But you know what they say: a better chip demands a better dip. And jarred salsa or pre-made guacamole simply wouldn’t do. I needed the good shit. So I bit the bullet, faced my fears, bought some avocados, made some guac (live!), and I’ve been repeating the process daily ever since. #Growth.
another book non-update
So we’re still about a year away from my book’s release date, and I basically have no big updates that I can share publicly. But! I can say that I recently finished line edits, and now things are moving along on the production timeline, and so I suspect this newsletter will actually start fulfilling its intended purpose of book-promo ANY month now. (In the meantime, I’ll just keep talking about my relationships with various dips. Perhaps French onion next month???)
thank you for reading!!!
If you enjoyed this, please feel free to recommend it to a friend. If you hated it, I can only assume you are a disgruntled On the Border customer from 2008, and listen: I’m not sorry!!! Guac Live is a fucking abomination. Blessed be.
Nic