How to make avocado toast

(As you might recall, in the spring of 2020, an angel appeared to me in a dream and presented me with access to a most holy and beautiful artifact: Mrs. Rogers’ Neighborhood, the cooking blog that Emily Rogers, my cisgender self from an alternate universe, writes. What might seem to be a cooking blog at first is, instead, a window into the multiverse; I have also checked in on the other Emily at Christmas, at Pride, at Halloween and at Valentine's Day. But doesn't she seem like she has really ambivalent feelings about the American experiment, feelings that might emerge on Independence Day? Yeah, I thought so, too. Let's see what she's up to! It is important to note, as always, that photos do not survive the transmission between universes, but the alt text descriptions of those images are provided in place.)

Important note: If you are not up on your Emily Rogers #lore or want to refresh your memory, check out the Rogersverse Wiki, which keeps track of all major characters, plot points, and emotional moods.

Hey, Emmy's Army! Happy Fourth of July, or as it's known in some parts of the world, "American Independence Day"! It's been punishingly hot here the last few days. The kids even talked me into a swimsuit.

[Image: A tall blonde woman wears a modest two-piece swimsuit and lays on the grass in the sun. The child-sized shadow of the photographer can be seen just off to the side.]

We were up in Door County most of this week, cleaning up the plot where the lake house was and salvaging what we could. We were insured, but it's still scary to have a cloud come down out of the sky and wipe a place you'd spent so much time in off the face of the planet.

[Image: A rubble-strewn plot of land, a single wall of a lake cabin still standing. Behind it, the lake's surface is placid. The property is blocked off with yellow caution tape.]

Thank you to all who reached out after the tornado and offered to help. We're fortunate and can replace most of the things we lost (if David even wants to replace the boat, which he's undecided on). Plenty of other folks lost way more than we did, and you should help them, maybe by donating to the Red Cross.

‎When I was a little girl, my dad used to make Bryan and me do fire drills, hurricane drills, you name it drills. We'd be crouched in the hallway of our house, crawling beneath imaginary smoke. I would be crying about having to leave my dolls behind, and dad would shout, "Stop it, Em! They're only things!"

I think he was maybe a little cruel there. Yeah, my girls' lives are more precious than their favorite toys, but we give the things we love little pieces of ourselves. M had left Grouchy Bear, her favorite stuffy from when she was a child, up at the lake house. And even though she's getting older and needs a friend like Grouchy Bear less and less (as evidenced by her leaving him at the lake house), she still cried when we couldn't find him. Maybe he'll turn up somewhere. If he doesn't, then wherever he went, I hope he's loved.

But, yeah, Dad was right about one thing: I'm glad my girls and David and I are all safe and sound. I'm so happy we were in Milwaukee, so the storm only gave us lots of rain, even though a flooded backyard is no fun.

[Image: A tall man in his mid-40s frowning deeply, water in his backyard rising over the ankles of his rubber boots.]

The morning after the storm, I did my usual shopping at the farmers market because I didn't know what else to do. On my walk back, pushing my little cart full of food, I passed the Pick 'n Save and saw a big display of avocados. And I wanted nothing more than avocado toast.

I've kept a secret from you, Emmy's Army: I'm really good at making avocado toast. So I bought a bunch, and we've been living off avocado toast for a week now. So now you and I are going to make avocado toast! Gather your ingredients!

[Image: Avocados, cherry tomatoes, a bevy of spices, an egg, a garlic clove, butter, lime juice, goat cheese, hot sauce, and a loaf of bread.]

Avocados don't grow in Wisconsin. Beth lives in California, and she has a friend who has an avocado tree in his backyard, so she can just go over and pluck them right off the branch. But if I want an avocado, it must be shipped here from far off. That limits my options, but we shall persevere, Emmy's Army.

[Image: The blonde woman gives an awkward thumbs up in front of an avocado tree.]

The critical thing to know is that you should do whatever you want when it comes to avocado toast. I will tell you what I do, but you might have other ideas. Follow those ideas! You have a ton of options here. I am not your boss! [You are, strictly speaking, my boss.] We're each other's boss, David.

Avocado toast lives and dies by the avocado and the toast. For the toast, I recommend something with a lot of flavor — a sourdough or a multi-grain or something. I will use some sourdough I bought at Breadsmith here in Milwaukee. (If you're in town, check them out!) But if you are a white bread kind of person and want to use Wunder Bread, I promise not to judge. We're all pals here. [As always, some brand names in Emily's universe seem to be different. In this case, "Wunder Bread," which is virtually identical to Wonder Bread, except for its mascot, an undeniably cute yet downright terrifying enormous roach named "Wunder the Roach." — ed.]

If you just buy a random avocado at the store, you're almost certainly buying a Hass avocado, and fun fact! The Hass avocado was developed by Rudolph Hass, who was born and raised in Milwaukee before moving to a place where he could realize his passion for creating new avocados.

Truth be told, when I was in California last, Beth had me sample some other avocado varieties, and I preferred several of them, particularly Reeds. But you and I, most likely, don't live in California and, thus, will have to go with Hass. It's fine! It's downright all-American! Fireworks!

When buying your avocado, look for one where your fingers can barely squeeze it. Cut the avocado in half (at home, not at the store). If the seed doesn't just pop out, gently press your knife down into it, then twist. It should come loose. Then you just have to get it off the blade. (A process!) Scoop the avocado's glorious flesh into a blender or bowl, and prepare for the most critical part.

[Image: A small blender with the flesh of one avocado inside, olive oil dripping across it.]

Here's why this step is essential: If you get the avocado mash right, it will forgive a lot. Avocado doesn't have a ton of flavor on its own, but it pulls out and enhances other flavors, so it's a great place to try out various spice blends. I usually put in one tablespoon of olive oil, followed by salt, pepper, cayenne, and (my secret ingredient) turmeric, all to taste. David likes paprika in there, but I think it's too much. [Lucky for you, I like things that are too much.] Gross.

Blend or mash that together (depending on your tools), and if you have a mixture that tastes good to you, you could honestly just spread that on a piece of toast, sprinkle it with some lime juice, and have a great time.

[Image: That avocado is now a rich, green mixture, and a woman's manicured finger is coated in it.]

But we're not stopping there! We're going to poach an egg, why not? We've poached a billion eggs here. But in case you're new: Fill a pot about two-thirds full with water, dump in a tablespoon of vinegar, get it to a light simmer, stir the water with a spoon to create a vortex, then dump an egg seasoned with salt and pepper into the middle of that vortex. Set a three-minute timer.

[Image: An egg bathes in just barely bubbling water.]

The day after the storm, when I walked down to the market, my brain was going a million miles a minute. I couldn't stop thinking about what happened to the lake house and how scary it is to be alive right now and how silly it was that we had a lake house to begin with, even if it was maybe a third of the size of most of the other houses up there. So you might understand why, when I saw that avocado display, I thought: These might be the last avocados I will ever eat.

Avocados don't grow in Wisconsin. They just don't. If I want one, a whole system has been designed to produce that avocado and get it to me. That system is so fragile, and it's also destroying the planet, at least a little. No matter how hard I try to buy locally or whatever, it's not enough. Someday, the whole system will break, and I won't be able to get avocados on demand. Maybe I'll still be able to get to California and have them at Beth's place. Or maybe I'll just have to remember what avocado toast tasted like and hope my memory is accurate.

When I got home, David told me my father had called. I don't really talk to my parents anymore, not since they refused to write M's name on any of her gifts last Christmas. I shouldn't have called him back, but I knew he wanted to gloat about us losing the lake house under the guise of making sure we were okay. I didn't even need to have the conversation with him. I knew every single second of it in my bones before I called. I still called. Some part of me doesn't believe a bad thing has happened until my dad makes me feel like I screwed something up just by existing when the bad thing happened.

He didn't even start with "Are you okay?" or "I heard the news. That's scary," or even "Is the house gone?" No, he started with, "I didn't know they have tornados in Wisconsin."

Here are some things I didn't tell him:

• I didn't tell him how, yes, tornados sometimes hit Door County, but rarely that early or with that ferocity.
• I didn't tell him that the climate is obviously changing and making freak weather like that more likely.
• I didn't tell him that the world is cooking in its crust, and every time I so much as buy avocados, I worry about the fragility of the systems I am handing to my girls like so much glued-together pottery.
• I didn't tell him that I constantly worry that I brought two beautiful, perfect daughters into a world that cannot continue in the way it has if they are to live fulfilling lives, but that changing that world feels impossible.
• I didn't yell at him about the end of Roe, or the fleet of anti-trans laws that are reducing the number of states where we can raise M safely to a number I can count on two hands, or the hundreds sacrificed every week to a barely coherent fear of everything that isn't what the fearful already know.
• I didn't tell him that he never tried to see me, not really.
• I didn't tell him that he and mom froze me in place as a baby girl they got from some poor college student in Michigan whom they never even met.
• I didn't tell him that I wedged myself so tightly into the shape my parents imagined for me that my authentic self became a splinter, digging into my brain until I finally started to figure out who I was in my 30s.
• I didn't tell him I had found my birth mother.
• I didn't tell him I would write about that in my blog, but he would never know because he doesn't read my blog.
• I didn't tell him that the things we lose are never just things when we pour ourselves into them instead of being honest with anyone else.
• I didn't tell him I'm way more worried about M never seeing Grouchy Bear again than I am about her never seeing her grandpa again because Grouchy Bear at least took her as she was.

Instead, I told him about how there have been tornados in Door County here and there throughout the years and how sometimes they cause terrible destruction like they did this year.

He huffed and launched into some long-winded thing about how if I had stayed in Florida, I would know how to be ready for a storm and how he and mom had enough canned food to get through a hurricane as big as Andrew.

Somewhere in the middle of that, I zoned out and let him keep talking. I started unpacking the groceries from the farmers market. It was almost noon, so I figured I might as well have some avocado toast for lunch. I made my mash and started poaching my egg, which meant it was time to deal with the toast.

Toast! An essential part of avocado toast, Emmy's Army! It's right there in the name! I like the toast to be a little crunchier; M prefers it practically black; David likes it as light as possible. [I love savoring the flavor of the bread.] I don't know if it works that way, babe, but good for you.

Regardless: All toast is good toast.

[Image: An all-American slice of toast, with a pat of butter melting atop it]

Here's another one of my secret avocado toast hacks: Butter that toast up to your heart's content, then crush a single garlic clove under a knife and rub it all over the buttered toast. It's a little goopy, but it will give you a hint of garlic flavor without going all the way there. G likes to completely smear the clove on her toast, but you can also be a sophisticate like me and throw it out after getting some of the oils infused into the butter. [I like how you implied you're more of a sophisticate than a first grader.] Oh, but I am! See how I hold my nose in the air??

Now you're ready to spread as much of your avocado mash as you like across your toast. I tend to use about half my mash per slice of toast, but if you have an exceptionally big or small avocado, that ratio might change. Sprinkle something acidic across the top (I prefer lime juice, but you might love lemon), then add just a smattering of everything bagel seasoning. Again: This is just what I do. You should feel free to do literally anything else, so long as avocado and toast are involved.

[Image: Toast, covered in the olive green beauty of avocado mash, fingers depositing a constellation of everything bagel seasoning onto it from above.]

"—just come to your uncle's beach house this summer," my dad said, and I snapped back to consciousness right in the middle of cutting a cherry tomato in half.

(In general: Acids taste great on avocado toast. So I usually add three or four cherry tomatoes cut in half and a smattering of pickled onions. If you don't have a man at your farmers market from whom you purchase pickled onions, here's a quick hack to approximate pickled onions in your microwave.)

"Why would we go to the beach house?" I said. "Why would we ever bring M to Florida ever, ever, ever again?"

"Emilbee, you and I both know M is always welcome in Florida." Except he didn't say M, so I hung up.

"You okay?" David said. I hadn't realized he was there the whole time. I was gripping the counter so tightly that my knuckles were white. I hovered over the surface of my avocado toast, and it grew blurrier as I looked down at it until the blur resolved into a tear falling onto it (adding a burst of salty richness, let's be honest). I let out a noise I still don't understand, and David pulled me back against him and kept saying my name.

My Uncle Carl's beach house was the place I loved most as a kid. Uncle Carl was a neurosurgeon, and he bought this rambling place out on Hutchinson Island. He never married, so he lived his life in a way that showed off his money. He bought an enormous beach house, and he drove the best cars, and he flew to New York to see opera all the time, and he bought fine art that he kept in his beach house, just daring a hurricane to come and destroy it.

Dad was Uncle Carl's younger brother, and he felt forever pinned down by his brother's shadow. Dad was successful, but he was not Carl successful, and every time we set foot in that beach house, he would seethe a little bit. He could never afford a beach house, and he felt like that was a personal failing, I guess.

One time, we were out on the water after dark, and Uncle Carl turned his boat back toward the shore. The beach house grew and grew as we sped closer to it. The lights were on, making the whole space glitter, and my 12-year-old brain conjured an image of the boat being a moth, trying desperately to dash itself against that light. I looked down and saw my father's hand grip the rail of the boat a little more tightly with every moment we drew closer until the house was all we could see. He looked over at me and rolled his eyes. "Show off," he said. I laughed, but I didn't understand why the things I cared about were just things, but the things he didn't have could make him feel so small.

Or at least I didn't understand until I was older and started a successful recipe blog and managed to get a great deal on a fantastic lake house in Door County, Wisconsin, because I knew the second I owned it, I would make my dad see me for who I was. And he was impressed. For a second or two. Then he started waiting for the tornados to come and restore order to the world. They came. If I learned any lesson from my dad, it's that when you always expect the end to come, you'll be satisfied eventually.

I sometimes feel silly talking about my good fortune in the blog. I got lucky. I started a recipe blog at precisely the right time, and I found a good audience, and, okay, I'm a pretty good writer. I made money, and I built a nice life atop that. But when I stood in the ruins of the lake house, I realized that for all the good times we had there, the main reason I had ever wanted it was to live my father's dream in a way that would always be out of his reach. I love my life; it is also a life whose contours were built to mirror the particular smallness of the people who raised me.

I never needed a lake house. Nobody does. I thought I did because I didn't know how to show my father I was happy if he couldn't look at an object meant to represent that happiness. I imagined the tornado skimming over the water's surface, dashing itself against the lake house, tearing it apart. I imagined my father's smile as it happened.

[Image: A small cabin, seen from 100 yards away, across the smooth and calm surface of a lake. It is dusk, and the lights inside seem to glow.]

And then I was back in the kitchen. I reached down and squeezed David's arm. He let me go, and I turned around and pressed my face into his shoulder, rubbing my snot-covered nose against his shirt.

"My dad never saw me," I said, "and I thought he just didn't understand me. But he doesn't see M either. He understands both of us perfectly well. He just chooses not to because it's easier."

Then G wandered in and made quite clear how much she wanted lunch.

Which means it's time for all of us to eat! Bring on the finishing touches! Put your beautifully poached egg on top of the mashed avocado (you remembered to take the egg out of the water while I was blathering, right?), then crumble some goat cheese over it. Then add a dash of hot sauce over the whole mess and dig in. Make sure to split the yolk first, so you get the gooey goodness everywhere!

[Image: The completed dish, a perfectly jammy yellow yolk oozing out over the green and red and purple of the meal.]

I was taught that America is a ladder, and it only goes in one direction. I was raised to believe my life would be better than my parents' lives. And I guess by the standards of "eventually owned a house by a large body of water," it was. I did that at one time. I'm not sure I need to do it again. I already have a better life than my parents because I try to see my daughters for who they are.

I've started to think about what it would mean to ensure my girls have a better life than I did. "Better" is a deceptive word because we're so used to thinking of it in terms of the things we own, and yet we imbue those things with such power that we let them rule us. But "better" can mean other things, too.

The world M and G will be adults in feels so scary and dark to me. I want them to know that to have a "better" life than me might mean to have a life that is so alien to me that I would hardly recognize it. I want them to live and be happy and be themselves. I want them to have dreams that are their own, not pale imitations of the things I was taught to want because the things I was taught to want ended up being so empty. I want them to understand the world will line up against them, but not all of it. I want them to find the pockets worth fighting for and find a way to stay there. I want them to understand that building a world worth living in requires sacrifice, letting go of things you don't actually need until they are taken from you.

I also want them to understand that nothing is ever "just" a thing. If you try hard enough, you can take anything and make it into something vital to you. That's a trap, sure, but it's also inevitable. We use the things we love as proxies for the ghosts of everything we can no longer get to.

Someday, I really will have my last slice of avocado toast. The system will break down, or the climate will collapse, or the nuclear warheads will fall, or another disease will come, or the aliens will invade, or the skies will rain blood, or avocados will go extinct, or California will fall into the sea, or I will die. (That last one seems pretty certain.)

But the world hasn't ended yet. It will. But not right now. Right now, it's sunny outside after the storm has passed, and I'm with people I love, and I'm eating something delicious. We have all the time we need.

[Image: A little girl, walking just ahead of the camera, carrying a teddy bear by the foot, so its head drags in the sand of a white, sandy beach. In the distance, an endless blue.]

This week's reading music: "Star Witness" by Neko Case

Episodes is published twice per week. Mondays alternate between a free edition on various topics and a subscriber-supported edition where I recap TV shows of interest. Fridays offer pop culture thoughts from freelance writers. The Friday edition and the biweekly recaps are only available to subscribers. Suggest topics for future installments via email or on Twitter. Read more of my work at Vox.