January 6, 2010

Avocado mishaps and literary avocados

A mishaps during Sunday’s trip to the grocery store led to me bringing home ten avocados when I really only meant to buy one, and so it’s avocado city here these days, as we seek to use them up before they get riper than ripe (read: rotten). Which is sort of easy, because we have a baby, and avocados are nature’s baby food, but even she doesn’t need that much avocado, so we’ve also been indulging in avocado milkshakes, avocado pizza, avocado scones, and my new favourite discovery– avocado bread, which might just be the best thing in the universe. I’ve adapted the recipe as per the reviewer’s comment to add a bit more sugar, and then I forget about the sugar and pretend that this is a healthy treat, because avocado is the good fat, after all.

So the point is that I’m totally obsessed with avocados, and have been thinking about bookish ones. I remembered this piece from the London Review of Books about Californian agriculture and avocado orchards: “Avocados have always been the icon of San Diego’s countryside (which produces much of the US harvest) and if the remaining growers are forced to sell out, the past will become as inaccessible as the future will be combustible.”

In terms of books, there is Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado (which I once wrote about here). The famously dirty Wetlands that had an avocado on its cover. We have a picture book called Avocado Baby by John Burningham. I wrote a poem about avocados during my Poetic April back in 2008. Googling, I found this ode to the avocado by Richard Wireck in a literary journal called r.kv.r.y. “O Avocado Avocado”, in which the author asked to be slathered, buried “in God’s sweet, gold pudding, the very butter of paradise.” And YA author called Daniel Pinkwater wrote a book called The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death. A further web search brings me to Avocado: Botany, Production and Uses, which sounds a bit boring, and Sex and the Avocado, which sounds less so, until you realize it’s written by the author of 105-Plus Guacamole Dip Recipes.

Which is nowhere near enough. What other literary avocados am I missing? Forgive me for not coming up with more on my own, but I’ve got another loaf to bake.