Have you heard that there’s supposed to a shortage of avocados this season? Gosh, I hope it’s not too bad: the avocado has long been a prized piece of produce in my world. Once when I was a chubby 13-year-year, I selected an avocado-citrus salad in a cafeteria line and my mother shrieked, “Nooooo!” I honestly thought someone had had a heart attack, or at least that she’d seen a rodent, until her follow-up pronouncement: “Avocado is soooooooo fattening.” Gosh, I thought I was doing something good — grapefruit, lettuce, all the skinny food. In fact, I’d never seen avocado before and didn’t really know what it was. Obviously, I’d gotten fat some other way.

summertime soup into “cream of whatever.” (When using avocado in a blender recipe, add it at the end of blending. It’s delicate and doesn’t want to be processed too much.) But to keep things simple, I’d like to share with you the guacamole my husband I enjoy as (1) a dip for veggies or flax crackers; (2) the scoop atop a green salad (where the tuna-salad or chicken-salad used to go); (3) stuffed into a scooped-out home-grown tomato for a Christmas-colored summer treat; (4) a tasty substitute for butter on baked potatoes or yams.