The trouble with avocados is the difficulty of finding perfect ones. I'm sure that lots of people think they hate avocados because the first time they had one it was unripe, or overripe, or stringy inside or going black. A promising avo in a shop will be evenly coloured, have no soft bruisy areas, will be firm but not rock-hard and will yield to gentle pressure at the tip end (not the fat middle bit). You may need to buy it a couple of days in advance to ripen in a warm place next to a bunch of bananas. Olives are another thing. Mrs Steve wouldn't look at them for years but now we almost wrestle each other to get at them. Some olives are disgustingly soft little things in abject little plastic pots with all sorts of additional stuff such as a weirdly sour dressing, chilli, lumps of garlic, pimiento stuffing or dry little cubes of cheap feta. An almost universal rule in our house is that we buy stone-in olives only. Sicilian Nocellara olives in extra virgin olive oil (not brine - whose daft idea is that) are top of our list. The giant ones from M&S are lovely. If you ever go to the covered market in Almería there's an amazing lady with the best olive stall I've ever seen. We buy gallons of olives there and there are never any left after a few days. I do buy tins of the cheapest stoned black olives for when I do whore's spaghetti. They go in with tinned tomatoes, capers, chilli flakes and anchovies, and definitely no Parmesan. Ladies of the night wouldn't have done posh, I'm thinking.