Palta rellena (stuffed avocado)

Ingredients for 4 servings:

• 2 avocados
• 1 m.-sized potato(s)
• 1 large carrot(s)
• 1 beetroot, pre-cooked
• 100 g peas (frozen)
• 150 g mayonnaise
• salt and pepper
• 1 lemon(s), the juice
• possibly salt water

Instructions

Working time approx. 15 minutes; Rest time approx. 1 hour; Cooking/baking time approx. 15 minutes; Total time approx. 1 hour 30 minutes

avocado from Peru stuffed with Russian salad

For the Russian salad, peel the potatoes, carrots, and beetroot and cut into cubes. Steam the diced potatoes and carrots for 15 minutes or boil them in salted water until tender. About 5 minutes before the end of the cooking time, add the peas and continue cooking (you can do this sooner, but I like my peas crunchy). Carefully mix the vegetable mixture with the pre-cooked beetroot cubes and mayonnaise, season with salt and pepper, and set aside in the refrigerator. Now, using a knife, cut the ripe avocados in half lengthwise (ripe avocados are like cutting through butter), remove the stone, and sprinkle lemon juice over the avocado flesh to prevent it from blackening in the air. Season with salt and place the Russian salad in the hollow where the stone was. In Peru, palta rellena is eaten out of the skin as an appetizer. In the supermarket, avocados are often rock-hard and unripe, so you have to make sure they give under the skin when pressed. Or you can just buy Hass avocados with the black skin; they’re the tastiest, but unfortunately also the most expensive. If you buy half-ripe avocados, you can wrap them in newspaper and let them ripen in a warm, dry place. This won’t work with the rock-hard avocados from the supermarket, however, because even with the newspaper, they’ll mold faster than they ripen.