Avocado saver

No, it’s not a shoe for a llama or an ostrich, it’s a new kitchen gadget: an avocado saver. I’m not big on kitchen gadgets because I reckon a knife can do most things … oops, one moment … the content of my middle kitchen drawer tells a different story. My messy drawer, (now, come on, we all have one of these!), contains a few beauties, things I wouldn’t be without, such as a jar screw, a grapefruit knife with a curved blade that has serrations on both sides, long tweezers, an old-fashioned apple corer, a melon-baller, a pizza wheel, bits of string, an assortment of corks, a metal skewer, a trussing needle, three meat-testing thermometers, of which one may work, defunct coins, paperclips, fluff and toothpicks. I think I’ll stop there, as there might – or might not – be some unmentionables. 

I didn’t buy the avocado saver. A friend gifted it to me, claiming it was the best thing since sliced bread. It went in the middle drawer for a month until one day, I remembered it, and used it.

It’s pretty self-explanatory, unless you are still stuck on the image of a llama with the soft paddy bits of their feet stuck in the hollows of avocado savers (it could work, just saying!).

If you eat a whole avocado at a time, you will never need an avocado saver, but if you regularly consume only half of an avocado, then this is the baby for you. Leave the stone in the half you are not going to consume, then put the avocado half in the avo saver, nestling the stone into the cavity. Then strap it in! The avocado flesh should then be butted up against the plastic locking out air, and that is, so it claims, what stops the avocado from darkening. Did it work? Not the first time. I persevered in the name of science. I could see that the avocado half had to fit snugly in its little cradle. The second attempt was better. I have now used it many times. Is it better than a squirt of lemon juice and a cover of plastic food wrap? I think they are about equal. But, and this is a big BUT, it keeps the avocado half neatly stored in the fridge until you need it (don’t you hate it when the plastic wrap unfurls and you get yukky stuff everywhere?), and, importantly, you don’t need to use plastic wrap. There is an argument to be had for plastic wrap, and I had it one day. I was with friends, eating, drinking and laughing, as you do, and someone said, they wash and reuse plastic food wrap. I looked at them, none too kindly. They were flying off to Europe the next week. You get my drift, I am sure. Or maybe I need to spell it out: you won’t save the planet by washing and re-using plastic food wrap (and if you wash it under really hot water, which you would need to do to make it safe to reuse, you may well release toxic chemicals which could then go into any food you cover). Again, in the name of science, I had a go at washing and reusing plastic food wrap. Anything that had been on meat or that was yukky didn’t make the cut. I managed to save quite a lot over a week, and just kept it in a bag in the fridge until I had time to deal with it. I washed the wrap in warm soapy water and rinsed it in cold water, using quite a lot of water in the process, and detergent, too, and draped it about the kitchen to dry. But then, I couldn’t make a cup of tea without having to undrape the kettle, and it was annoying trying to get a wooden spoon or spatula out of the implement container on the bench because all the tools were draped in plastic wrap. Plastic wrap was everywhere, like a giant multi-winged butterfly slowly emerging from its chrysalis spreading itself around my kitchen. I didn’t like it. I started to get all hot and bothered about it, so I opened the window to let in some air, and to help speed the drying, and flooff all the plastic wrap flew around the kitchen and stuck to itself like the worst sort of Sellotape misadventure you could ever have (you know, Christmas eve, finally get the kids in bed, wrapping gifts and the bloody tape you got from the $2 shop is under-performing). Let’s just say, I did the experiment so you don’t have to. Perhaps beeswrap is a better investment.