Adventures in Cooking: Avocado Toast

You probably already know I'm a picky-eating vegetarian, and that means I often have to reject entire restaurants on the grounds that they have nothing on the menu I can eat. But there is one thing any restaurant can offer and be assured that I'll happily dine there—avocado toast! People liked to make jokes about how much Millennials love avocado toast (at least until avocado toast morphed into a metaphor for economic collapse), but regardless of the dish's spotty reputation, this Millennial is happy it became a trend.

Unfortunately, while avocado toast makes a nice splurge for a single-meal Sunday, it is entirely impractical as part of a daily diet. A dollar-twenty-nine for a single avocado on sale!? That is not the way I spend my money. In fact, I cannot recall a single time when I have ever purchased a whole avocado (though I have purchased a house, so maybe I'm not such a Millennial after all).

The other thing people like to make jokes about is how really bad cooks can't even cook toast. Well, I confess, I am the butt of those particular jokes. I cannot make toast. Just add avocados, and you've got another kind of toast I can't make either. But that's about to change, because I just snagged a free avocado!

Let's have an Adventure in Cooking together, and make...

A Recipe for Avocado Toast!

Ingredients

• 1 avocado. You can't afford to buy an avocado, because you're a Millennial, so use the one that your coworker left on top of the mini-fridge 3 weeks ago. The first week, it was wrapped in a paper towel and you didn't know what it was. The second week, the paper towel had disappeared but the avocado remained. The third week, you went away for a vacation. The fourth week, your coworker went away for a vacation, and you decide that if anyone is going to eat that avocado, it's going to be you.
• 1 piece of garlic bread that you took home from a restaurant and stashed in the freezer.
• 1 tomato, because you wanted to put radish slices on top of your avocado toast, but you could only buy too many radishes in a bunch, so you needed something else red to make your toast photogenic.
• A handful of arugula, because your boyfriend loves that stuff and you usually have it lying around, plus it seems to be a common item to put on avocado toast.
• Salt

Instructions

1. Stealthily remove avocado from lunchroom and rehearse the story about why you took it, should anyone come questioning you.
2. Slice avocado in half and remove pit and skin.
3. In a small bowl, mash up half the avocado with a fork.
4. Cut garlic bread in half and put in toaster oven. Feel the sweat bead on your forehead as you turn the temperature dial to "toast," and the timer dial to "something slightly closer to light than to dark." This is the moment of truth. Will you make toast, or will this Adventure in Cooking end before it's even begun!?
5. Wipe your brow. You made toast! Now it's time to up the ante and make avocado toast. 
6. Take the mashed avocado and spread it on the bread.
7. Sprinkle the avocado with salt, top it with sliced tomatoes and arugula, and dig in!
8. NO WAIT! You're a Millennial! Instagram the shit out of it first!

I used a Hudson filter, with a dash of cropping.

If you're good at math, you noticed that the recipe only calls for half an avocado, so I made it twice. The second time, I even put some cheese on top, because I was feeling extra.

Another Adventure in Cooking, successfully survived.