Sev­eral years ago, when I was moving into an apart­ment of my own, my good friend Margot send me a won­derful house­warming gift: a mol­ca­jete. Go on, take a minute and look that up.

If you’ve ever been to a fancy (or very authentic) mex­ican restau­rant you may have been served gua­camole in one of these stone mor­tars. Most of the time a restau­rant will do this in an attempt to jus­tify the price of the dish you’re enjoying or per­haps make the meal feel more exotic. How­ever, a mol­ca­jete does allow a person to pre­pare cer­tain food items in a par­tic­ular way, and this way (coarse grinding) is par­tic­u­larly good for guacamole.

A good mol­ca­jete is nearly impos­sible to wash. It’s a bit like a cast iron griddle or a really nice wok. You never really clean it. You season it and then you rinse it off after every use. Sea­soning a mol­ca­jete takes a bit of muscle as you are required to grind var­ious items into the porous inner sur­face. Once you’ve done it, you’re good to go.

Griding the ingre­di­ents in a gua­camole helps to release the var­ious fla­vors and makes for an out­standing final product. My guac tends to be very strongly fla­vored and slighly acidic but gua­camole can be any­thing. It’s a little like salsa: its a food item that con­forms to some basic rules but can be pre­pared in many dif­ferent ways using var­ious ingre­di­ents. What­ever you like. Here’s what I like:

• 2 cloves garlic
• some green onion (eye­ball it), thinly sliced on a bias
• half a plum tomato or a little tomato paste
• half a jalapeño pepper, minced
• cilantro (half a handful of leaves and stems, finely chopped)
• the juice of half a lime
• 2 ripe Haas avo­cados (they should be squishy and brown)
• salt (as much as you like)
• cumin (maybe half a teaspoon)

A mol­ca­jete allows you to mash the garlic. You could also use a garlic press, I sup­pose. Mash together the garlic, onion, tomato, and jalapeño. Doing this first will allow the fla­vors (and heat) to be evenly spread through the gua­camole instead of clumping up in spots. Next, scoop the meat out of the avo­cados and add it to the mix along with the cilantro. Mash some more. Gua­camole doesn’t have to be per­fectly smooth, so don’t over-process. Finally, add the salt, cumin, and lime juice. At this point I some­times use a spatula for mixing since the lime juice tends to thin out the mixture.

Be careful with your garlic. I use two cloves but I don’t mind my mouth tasting like garlic later. Thank­fully, my fiancee doesn’t mind either. Also, be careful with the jalapeño. If you’re sen­si­tive to heat, take the seeds out of the pepper before you mince it.

I usu­ally have my guac with que­sadillas. They’re incred­ibly easy to pre­pare. All you need is Jack cheese, flour tor­tillas, and left­overs: cooked meat, chili, some canned corn or cooked beans… get cre­ative. Heat them up on a hot skillet or in the base of a flat-bottomed wok coated with a brushing of olive oil. Works perfectly.