Grilled Cheese With Guacamole Recipe

I admit it: I was a hot avocado snob. Look around you, I'm sure you know one. I'm talking about people who scoff at the idea of serving avocado at any temperature other than cool. People who hear of tempura-fried avocado and sneer in disgust. Those who would mini-puke at the very thought of putting guacamole into the center of a grilled cheese sandwich.

Perhaps there are some for whom warm avocado really does have the bitter flavor that some folks claim it does, but I think for most warm avocado-haters (my former self included), the symptoms are largely psychosomatic.

I started down my long journey from rejecting to embracing warm avocados in Colombia, where my wife's aunt served us ajiaco, a Colombian soup made with potatoes and chicken and served with chunks of avocado stirred into the hot broth. Avocado-in-hot-soup is a common feature all over Colombia. You'll see it stirred into frijoles, or into mondongo, a tripe stew from Medellín.

I've since had it deep-fried tempura style (delicious), grilled (phenomenal), and split in half, stuffed with meat and cheese, breaded, and fried (meh). Point is, I got over my warm avocado aversion, and perhaps so can you.

I can think of no better way to do it than with this sandwich, which combines the warm, gooey, crisp, buttery comfort of a grilled cheese with the creamy tang of guacamole.

I've always wondered what it'd be like to make a grilled cheese sandwich in which not only were all four sides of the bread slices buttered (you do toast all four surfaces of your bread when making grilled cheese, right?), but the cheese slices were buttered too.

My hedonism knows few bounds, but buttering cheese might be one of them. As we all know, avocados are the butter of the plant kingdom, so this sandwich is the next best thing. And it's easy for us to fool ourselves into even believing it's healthy, what with its greenness and good fats and all. Right?

Serve some extra guacamole on the side to make the whole thing extra healthy.

I'm not a betting man, but if I were, I'd place good odds on this being one of the best things ever.