Miss Sasha posted a peculiar-looking recipe on Facebook, then got in her car and drove to either Mars or Kendall Park, but definitely one of those. Anyway, while she was traveling incognito, I lost track of the post and the recipe, so I did a little poking around on the Intertubes and learned a few things.
Tata: Everyone is talking about avocado and cocoa mousse. Have you tried this? I made some up yesterday. I would eat it. Pete would grease axels with it, but wouldn’t touch it on a cracker.
Snake: I looked at Giada’s recipe just now and I’m with Pete. Ugh. Doesn’t look very moussie at all, it looks gloppy. Mousse properly done should taste like chocolate air. But that involves separating eggs or using light cream that has been whipped like a british sailor.
Tata: You are quite right: it does not taste like chocolate air. It tastes like the food equivalent of sex up against a wall with a stranger you met outside a bar after closing time. It is full of What did I just do? Nobody on the Food Network is going to mention that. You will know why they’re sweating.
Snake: Ok. Sex with strangers you just met means I will give it a try. I will probably have to call it something besides mousse. My vocabulary can take it though.
Tata: Call it Brenda and try not to think about the cellophane. I am not saying you’ll like it, but it’s just weird enough try just because.
I surveyed a bunch of recipes and decided to start here because she reminds me of chatty Miss Sasha and has two different color eyes, a sure sign of a double helping of crazy. This writer is a vegan, which means mousse without eggs or cream. Her ideas were interesting, especially regarding variations.
Here’s one from Sheryl Crow, whom we love. Here we have a cook who licks food processors clean. Here we have a recipe writer with a few sticky keys.
I started with two ripe avocados and mashed ’em up, then added agave, cocoa powder, ground ginger and cayenne and a pinch of salt and whipped the whole thing until the texture was uniform. I tasted and added a bit more agave and cocoa powder. An hour later, Pete and I tasted it together and he made a face like I’d tossed his Hot Wheels collection into the Home Smelting Pit, now with extra smelt! I didn’t push and forgot about the mousse for two days. When I stuck a spoon into it today, the mousse tasted like the dirtiest, smuttiest, spiciest, naughtiest, adults-only dark chocolate ganache ever. You should make this and have some sexy sex, alone or with a sexy sex friend. Or a stranger. Next time, I might add cinnamon.
Poor Impulse Control 
It looks appalling. I may have to try it. I do love avocado bubble tea.
i’m giving it a try tonight. as I was driving out of san diego I saw a guy on the side of the road with bags of 30 avocados for $5. they are fresh picked and local, the chocolate stuff I gots.
Can’t wait to hear your results – for SCIENCE!
If it’s from Giada, it’s just a gimmick and serves no useful purpose. Also, why ruin chocolate mousse with avocado and why ruin avocado, which is so delicious I can actually eat an avocado every single day and not get tired of it, with chocolate? The recipe makes no sense in terms of “Why not do this?” That’s a basic unit of cooking. You make something because it is a good idea to do it. Combining chocolate and avocado doesn’t make any sense.
Giada is a lousy cook and is only on TV because the Food Network abandoned cooking for gimmicks and “competitions”. They used to talk about how to cook and make good food on the Food Network. Now it’s all cooking competitions with ridiculous premises. “Let’s see who can make the Kentucky Derby-themed cupcake.” So stupid. Mind you, the Food Network has no purpose anymore. I can find cooking demos on YouTube for practically anything, and recipes for EVERYTHING on the internet, whether there is a video or not.
Side note: none of the bagel recipe videos are worth a damn. Makes me think I should make my own. My bagels are phenomenally good. I won’t put my mother-in-law’s babka recipe on the internet. We share the results, but not the recipe.
Also, we were in NYC last weekend. I miss New York so much. First good pizza we’ve had in ages, but we didn’t see a decent bagel in NYC the whole time. Nobody does the work to make good bagels Boiling the dough in an alkaline solution is too much work for retail stores. Ask Pete to send me his bagel recipe and I’ll send him mine and we can compare.
Omigod, take a breath!
To backtrack, you left the Land O’ Lutefisk? Do tell.
We went back east for my dad’s unveiling. We spent a couple of days in NYC and only went to NJ one day for the unveiling, then flew home. We saw a play (Orphans) at the Schoenfeld, an opera (Giulio Cesare) at the Met, had dinner at La Boite en Bois (excellent), Ember Room (not very good), and hung around Times Square a little (sigh, I miss a city that doesn’t close at ten o’clock). We also spent a morning in the MOMA, toured Grand Central Terminal, went into and looked around the library on Fifth Avenue (I had never been inside before, but I used to eat lunch in Bryant Park on nice days when I worked in the City…back when it was fun because the park was filled with drug dealers and homeless people in the early 1980s), and visited the lobby of the Chrysler Building. I miss New York so much. Even though they took so much of the character out of it, it is still the best city in the world.
My grandfather left me in the restaurant of the Chrysler Building, where I sat in a toy car booth, eating a cheeseburger while he went on an audition. Wish I’d known about your dad’s unveiling. I would have sent you knishes or something.
Thanks for the thought. It was just so wonderful to have good food again after living in this food wasteland for so long. I have come back and now hate Minnesota even more because New York and the east coast is so great. People here are thoughtless and mean, the precise opposite of what they try to advertise. New Yorkers were so damned NICE to us the whole time in the City, the precise opposite of what these yahoos in Minnesota pretend.