Superior snacking

A good snack can be just as satisfying as a meal when you put in the effort and strive to create something more imaginative than the default cheese and crackers, apple with peanut butter, or whatever your personal go-to nosh might be. I've made myself some tasty snacks lately and thought I'd post them here.

I think my favorite snack in the whole wide world is guacamole. It was the dish that converted me to avocados after years of finding their texture unpleasant, and it hasn't lost its charm since. My "recipe" is simple: avocados, mashed but with some chunks left intact; tomatoes, finely diced; green onions, tops included, finely chopped; minced garlic, chopped cilantro and plenty (plenty) of fresh lime juice and salt. Vary the proportions to suit your own tastes; you can't go wrong:

















Onto another classic: the fried egg. What it lacks in invention it makes up for in sheer savory satisfaction. Salty, a little bit greasy, and from its shell to your mouth in about three minutes, the fried egg is the perfect snack, especially when eaten late at night, sprinkled with hot sauce and perched atop a slice of buttered toast:

















And I've saved my most off-the-cuff creation of late for last: the "Mexican" "pizza." I conceived of this most inauthentic bite when staring into my fridge, which on a recent afternoon was nearly as empty as my growling stomach, and spotting the following items: corn tortillas (featured in the taco post below), a block of Swiss cheese, some grilled hot Italian sausage links, a small container of leftover already-chopped scallions and tomatoes, a jar of salsa, and some beginning-to-wilt fresh cilantro. And then the idea for this "pizza" struck me. Here's how I made it. First, I sliced a sausage link into thirds lengthwise and seared them in a hot cast-iron pan, rendering some more of their fat and crisping them up a bit. I removed the sausage and warmed a tortilla in the pan; it soaked up the aforementioned pork fat and looked good enough to eat on its own. But I didn't stop there. I sliced up some Swiss and laid it on the tortilla, ran it under the broiler to melt then cheese, removed it, sprinkled on some scallions and tomatoes and finally placed the sausage slices on top of the whole thing. After one more run under the broiler, I crowned this increasingly vertical stack with a good spoonful of corn-and-black bean salsa and showered it with torn cilantro leaves. OK, yeah, so it was a good 10 minutes' work for a snack, but it was well worth it: hot, smoky, crisp and yielding all at once, this little number pleased my palate as well as my stomach: