Snag a great deal on some avocados? Dying to rip into them, but they aren’t quite soft enough to mash for sandwich spread or guacamole yet? Here’s a simple answer I came up with this weekend when the same situation came up at our house.

A week or so ago, I snagged some gorgeous avocados for 79 cents a piece at Save A Lot. Normally, I’m super lucky to find them on sale for a buck each at any of the other grocery stores in my area. My husband and I were both totally Jonesing for guacamole, so I sprung for a pack of roma tomatoes in addition to my usual grape ones and went home planning on waiting out the ripening process. A week later I was still out of luck. Slightly soft, but still too firm to mash. The problem? The roma tomatoes wouldn’t stay soft forever. So I devised this simple salad answer as a side dish for our toaster oven pesto and cheese melts on whole grain bread.

What you need: avocados, roma tomatoes, onions, sea salt and lemon juice.

What you do: Peel and slice the avocados. Rough is fine. No need to be all the same size and shape. In fact, I preferred the look of this salad as a totally rustic side dish. Wash and chop the roma tomatoes and peel and cut the onions roughly as well. Any kind of onion will work, but the red / purple ones add a bit more color. Drizzle and toss with lemon juice and sea salt. I used freshly ground sea salt, but the regular canister version would be fine as well. Also, with lemon juice you’ll need to choose if you want to go for the effort and cost of fresh squeezed. If I had some lemons to use up, I might. However, I normally use (and did for the salad this weekend) the large bottles of Real Lemon juice that come in a bulk size two-pack at the warehouse store.

The result is a rustic side dish blending simple flavors that are nearly as Mediterranean as they are Latin American. If you like simple dishes celebrating the flavors of fresh ingredients, this recipe just might be your answer to extra firm avocados.

Photo Credit: Emdot