Too Many Avocados, and Blackberry Napoleon

Two buys at Findlay Market this Saturday: five avocados for $2 and two baskets of blackberries for $3. The blackberries you could examine and they were nearly perfect. Avocados, however, are always more problematic and these were starting to get squishy, but since the going rate was a buck an avocado, it seemed worth the risk. (A favorite line from Umberto Eco's Travels with a Salmon: "I asked for a lawyer and they brought me an avocado.") (full text on a Chinese blog: http://shelve.blogspot.com/; just scan down)

Problem was, we didn't dare open them till the last moment, so that meant we couldn't really plan what to do with them until we'd see what we had to work with. In the end we had one perfect, one almost perfect, and three kind of mangy, adding up to three and a half avocados, still a bargin. The two nice ones we simply filled with a blend of mayo, a healthy shot of Madras curry powder and a dash of soy sauce (the only dip that goes faster at any party is the unreconstructed, old-timey, white-trashy-but-never-to-be-beat sour cream and Lipton onion soup mix. I don't think that anyone has used the mix to make so-called soup in generations.) The three over-ripe ones got smashed for guacamole: lots of coriander leaves, cumin, hit of garlic, and lime juice. We used some of the grape tomatoes in lieu of chips (we had run out).

Now dessert and a bit of backtracking. When I made the ladyfingers for the finger foods party, I just used a half recipe of genoise, thinking in my not-really-thinking-about-it-at-all sort of way, that since when I make tiramisu, I just use a sheet of genoise cut into three slabs rather than ladyfingers (the usual way in Italy, in any case), that genoise would substitute for ladyfingers in every case. So, follow the directions:
Preheat oven to 400º F
3 eggs: whip till pale and creamy (au ruban), 5 minutes
1/2 cup sugar: whip in, 5 more minutes
1/2 cup flour: fold in gently
2 TBSP melted butter, fold in at the end.
Put all this in your trusty pastry tube.
Start to worry when it leaks out the end.
Worry more when you pipe it out into fingers that rapidly spread.
Give up worrying when you look in the oven after 5 minutes and see that everything had spread into something broad and partially fused, but lovely and brown at the conjoined edges.
Go to Old Joy and make a real recipe for ladyfingers, which necessitates separating the eggs and folding in beaten egg whites, which makes the ladyfingers stand up all nice and puffy-like.

The mistakes, however, were mighty crisp and tasty. So I resolved to let nothing go to waste and use them later, while relating the tale at its proper moment. So invoking the Third Law of the Kitchen,* I renamed them Genoise Crisps. They've kept marvelously without refrigeration, still crisp after a week. I stacked them into a Napoleon (everything with layers is a Napoleon these days), using whipped cream for mortar. All berries are baptized in the true eau de vie, that is, Triple Sec. Voila!

*The 4 Laws of the Kitchen:
1. Never apologize.
2. Never explain.
3. When all else fails, rename it.
4. Every recipe begins with "Pour a glass of wine into the cook" (This last we owe to Jon Solomon).