These recipes with avocado could help beat the blues and reduce your blood pressure. If you’re feeling down, even depressed, and perhaps stressed due to endless lockdowns and travel restrictions, then put our best avocado recipes on repeat. They not only taste good but they’re good for you.
I don’t know about you, but my pandemic blues have returned. I’ve been feeling pretty down lately and increasingly anxious with Siem Reap currently under yet another lockdown and Delta cases rising. While there’s much to celebrate with Cambodia close to achieving its vaccination target of ten million, it seems we’re in the last 2% of unvaccinated people. Not by choice.
Regular readers might recall that our last apartment complex was quarantined the day we were registered to get our jabs. Despite assurances by medics and local authorities that we could get vaccinated after our release, we still haven’t been able to get our first doses, despite six weeks of trying. So I’ve ordered avocados.
But before I share our best recipes with avocado and tell you more about avocados, and how they’re thought to help beat the blues, I have a favour to ask. Grantourismo is reader-funded. If you’ve used and enjoyed our recipes, please consider supporting Grantourismo so we can keep creating mouthwatering food content for you.
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Recipes with Avocado to Help Beat the Blues and Reduce Your Blood Pressure
Avocados are amazing. They’re not only incredibly delicious, but they’re very nutritious, low in sugar, and high in fibre, which helps digestion. Avocados are also loaded with vitamins and minerals, including potassium, vitamins B6, C and E, and folate.
Research suggests folate helps keep depression at bay, lowers the risk of certain cancers, improves bone health, and wards off osteoporosis; potassium helps lower sodium levels, ease tension in blood vessel walls, and thus helps reduce blood pressure; while vitamin E helps reduce chronic inflammation, which is responsible for all kinds of diseases, including Alzheimers and diabetes.
Avocados are also high in ‘good’ fats, including a monounsaturated fatty acid called oleic acid, which can help reduce cardiovascular inflammation, and contain a nutrient called beta-sitosterol, which is essentially the plant version of cholesterol, which can help lower your cholesterol levels.
If that weren’t enough, avocados also have antioxidants which help protect your eyes from UV damage and prevent cataracts and macular degeneration, not that we get out much these days. Now let me tell you about our recipes with avocado.
Our Best Recipes with Avocado
Authentic Mexican Guacamole Recipe for the Best Avocado Dip
This authentic Mexican guacamole recipe is one of our best recipes with avocado. It makes a genuine Mexican guacamole of the kind your Mexican grandma might make if you have one. This is the best avocado dip recipe making you a guacamole with a creamy luscious texture, bright green colour and full flavour of perfectly ripe avocados. I’ve been making this authentic Mexican guacamole recipe for almost 30 years, since we tasted our first proper guacamole in Mexico City on our inaugural trip to Mexico in the Nineties. Mexican chefs recommend mashing the ingredients together with a fork or using a Mexican mortar and pestle called a molcajete. If you don’t have one you could try an Asian-style granite mortar and pestle.
Easy Creamy Avocado Smoothie Recipe for a Sip of Southeast Asia At Home
My easy creamy avocado smoothie recipe is another of our best recipes with avocado. The recipe calls for just four ingredients – including two 300 gram avocadoes – and takes no more than five minutes to make. The result is an incredibly creamy avocado shake that is filling and healthy. If you’ve had avocado smoothies in Southeast Asia or South America, you can travel with your taste-buds for a sip of the tropics at home. This super-simple avocado smoothie recipe has been on repeat in our kitchen here in Siem Reap since I bought a few kilos of fantastic avocados from farmers in Ratanikiri province in eastern Cambodia. They are the best avocados I’ve ever had in my life.
Classic Avocado Toast Recipe with Poached Eggs for an Australian Café Style Breakfast at Home
This classic Australian mashed avocado toast recipe with poached eggs is one of my favourite recipes with avocado. It will make you one of Australia’s most quintessential Aussie café breakfast dishes at home – ‘smashed avo on toast’. Just add a side of generously buttered sourdough toast, a jar of Vegemite, a tumbler of freshly squeezed orange juice (‘OJ’), and good coffee. There has to be really good coffee. This is the perfect breakfast to make this weekend if you’re in lockdown in Australia and missing your regular Sunday breakfast at your favourite neighbourhood café. Or if you’re not and, like these two Australians here in Southeast Asia, you’re just missing Australia and Australian café culture.
Fried Egg Avocado Breakfast Banh Mi Recipe or Breakfast Num Pang
Our recipe for fried egg avocado breakfast banh mi or breakfast num pang is another of our best recipes with avocado. This recipe will make you a filled breakfast sandwich or breakfast baguette that’s inspired by our favourite Australian café breakfasts (above) and the kind of baguettes with eggs that we’ve long eaten and loved in Cambodia and Vietnam, such as banh mi op la in Hoi An. After recently publishing the recipe for the smashed avocado and eggs on toast that we used to eat in our hometown of Sydney in the 80s and 90s and seeing how much our readers enjoyed the recipe, it got us wondering about a Southeast Asian style ‘smashed avo’ and whether it would work on a baguette. Let us know what you think.
Scrambled Eggs Breakfast Taco Recipe with Chorizo and Mashed Avocado
This easy scrambled eggs breakfast taco recipe with avocado and chorizo is another one of my favourite recipes with avocado. It makes a deliciously light yet filling breakfast taco that feels very healthy thanks to the avocado. While these Mexican breakfast tacos come together quickly, an array of garnishes, salsas and hot sauces help make this breakfast special. While Mexicans have long eaten tacos for breakfast – or brunch, lunch, dinner, or as a snack; at a taqueria, on the street, and in in the home – it’s Texas that claims to have coined the term ‘breakfast taco’. We don’t care who invented the breakfast taco, we’re big fans, especially when they’re spread with avocado.
Easy Avocado Pasta Recipe for a Retro Italian-Australian Pasta Classic
Our avocado pasta recipe is another of my favourite recipes with avocado. It makes an easy creamy avocado pasta sauce that you can serve at room temperature or heat up and combine with any fresh or dried pasta of your choice. A popular Italian-Australian pasta of the 1980s and 1990s, we think it’s time this retro-classic made a comeback. You can also serve this avocado pasta with grilled chicken or salmon, both of which were hugely popular additions for this avocado pasta in Australia.
Please do let us know in the comments below if you make any of our best recipes with avocado as we’d love to know how they turn out for you.
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