It being Sunday, I’ve been cooking. We had Veggie Nite tonight – not for the fst time, but the first time for ages.

Today, I cut open my first avocado. I have eaten it before, but never started from scratch before. The stone in the middle is rather cute. Very smooth, with a finish like wood.

Then, I made my first guacamole, which came out rather spicier than I anticipated. I have never actually eaten guacamole before, so I didn’t know what to expect, and slavishly followed the recipe. Well, more or less. I had the wrong quantities, and kind of made it up a bit. Maybe there was too much raw garlic, giving it a heartburn-tastic kind of an edge.

Then I moved onto things in my Abel & Cole box for the first time, starting with the celery to go with the guacamole. This was much leafier and much limper than the celery I get from the co-op, but was rather nice. It certainly smelled fantastic while I was cleaning the mud off and stripping off the leaves.

Then, I cooked chard for the first time too: discarding the leaves, frying chopped cleaned chard stems with onion and and the rest of the can of tomatoes to make a version of Chard and Tomato Pie on the A&C website, which turned out more like quiche than pie in my book.

In making the quiche, I also had to try making the pastry with olive oil instead of butter for the first time, since we had nearly run out of butter, but had a full bottle of oil. It worked rather well – cooked off to a lovely crispy finish and went well with the veggie tart I was making.