David, you want to be careful about where you get your guacamole. Some packaged dips are bogus. For example:

November 30, 2006—
"A woman in the United States is seeking unspecified damages and a Superior Court order barring Kraft Foods Inc. from calling its dip "guacamole." Her suit seeks class-action status. The Kraft product contains modified food starch, coconut and soybean oils, corn syrup and food coloring. It is less than 2 percent avocado, which, in traditional recipes, is the main ingredient of the Mexican dish."

Which is to say, whatever Kraft was selling, it wasn't guacamole!

Not unlike orange Jell-O, which, at one time, consisted of gelatin, orange food coloring, and a touch of citric acid as flavoring. Not a bit of orange or orange juice in it. Pure power of suggestion! Or so I read in a nutrition magazine.

In 1959, while Bob (Deckman) Nelson and I were singing around the San Francisco Bay area, we were often invited to the Sausalito home of Juanita Montrand, a retired Mexican cabaret singer and her son and daughter, Bennie and Lola. Juanita had retired from singing in cabarets, but not from singing. To keep her hand in, she sang one night a week at the "No Name Tavern" down on the Bridgeway. The "No Name" also featured such off-the-wall entertainers as Harry "The Hipster" Gibson, composer of "Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?" and "I Flipped My Wig in San Francisco" and other works that got him banned from radio, television, and most of the bigger clubs.

And the legendary Lord Buckley*, not too many months before his Lordship died.

Juanita sang Mexican folk songs in a warm, contralto voice, accompanying herself with a well-worn but deep-toned Mexican guitar.   She was in her sixties perhaps, but her singing voice hadn't aged, it had matured. Beautiful and rich! Her Malagueña Salerosa put everybody else's to shame! Sometimes she, Bennie, and Lola would sing it together in three-part harmony. Goosebumps!!

Juanita, a wonderful, grand lady, took we two itinerant minstrels under her wing and fed us frequently and lavishly, mainly with her specialty, Mexican cuisine. Not the sort of stuff you get in the usual run of Mexican restaurants one finds in the U. S., but the real thing!

One afternoon I sat chatting with Juanita in her kitchen while she prepared the evening's meal. After dinner, several other singers were due to arrive (including Rolf Cahn) and we were going to have an evening of much singing in Juanita's large living room, with the balcony and the picture windows looking out through the trees toward the lights of Tiburon. As she and I chatted, I watched her preparing a huge bowl of guacamole for the evening gathering. When finished, she took a tortilla, spooned a generous strip of guacamole across it, rolled it up, and offered it to me. I had to be careful to keep the guacamole from squirting out the ends, but—absolutely delicious!!

I don't remember her exact procedure, but this recipe [CLICKY] looks pretty close. She started with the freshest of ingredients, and she didn't garnish with radishes and she didn't serve them with tortilla chips, she served them with tortillas. But chips or toast are a functional medium for shoveling it into your face.

Before I got married, I sometimes used to buy avocados from the nearby grocery store. Not sure how to pick a good one, I would lurk near the stack of avocados and wait until an older woman stopped by and selected one. Usually she would pick up several, test them for softness/firmness, smell them, then make her selection. Once she left with her choice, I would pounce, and pick up the one she almost took.

I'd cut them in two, dig out the seed, drip a bit of lemon juice and a sprinkle of salt on one half, and eat it right out of the skin with a spoon. Then I'd sprinkle some lemon juice on the other half (neutralizes the enzyme that causes them to turn brown), wrap it in plastic wrap, and put it in the fridge until later. Yummy!!

Barbara usually gets our guacamole (and many other edibles, including very good wines) from a nearby Trader Joe's (dedicated to fresh, healthy, pure foods—plus zany catalogs and fliers).   It comes in plastic tubs, about a pint, I guess. They also have a very good hummus.

*Lord Buckley meets Groucho Marx

Don Firth