Whenever my brother talks about my blog, he just says the acronym GWAC (for Girl With A Curl) out loud. It sounds like “gwak”. While he was designing the top banner, he kept saying “GWAC” over and over again. I was close to being annoyed with the oft-repeated name until an idea popped into my head: “GWAC” sounds just like “guac”, which is short for guacamole, and the way most of my American friends call that green concoction you serve tortilla chips with.

So, I decided to take some of my favorite flavors and create a curlified guacamole. This one’s filled with the delicious tastes and textures of avocados, lime, tomatoes, mangoes (a nod to the tropics where I’m from) and feta cheese. Why feta? I needed a cheese sharp enough to cut through the creaminess of the avocados.

Putting this together, I found out that the traditional Aztec way of making guacamole was through mashing the avocado with a molcajete, a type of mortar and pestle that looks like this:

I wish I had such tools to work with because I’m a stickler for tradition, but seriously, a plain old bowl and a fork worked just as well. Mash together two small avocados, the juice of 1 1/2 lime, 1/2 cup diced mangoes (firm, not mushy), and 1/2 cup crumbled feta cheese. Tweak the flavors as you go along; trust those tastebuds!

A traditional herb that gets thrown into this happy mix is cilantro, which I hate with a passion. Most people expect this in guacamole, but I frankly think it tastes/smells like a stink bug we call “changaw” where I grew up. With this recipe, I can finally enjoy guacamole without feeling like I’m willingly ingesting the grossness of those insects. Hehe.

My secret ingredient? Don’t use traditional salt. Seasoned salt is the way to go! It has celery seed, turmeric, paprika and onion and garlic salt all mixed in, so you skip the step of adding all those in. The one I use is Lawry’s. (Another tip: season according to how salty your chips are. People sometimes forget that the chips are salty enough.)

After leaving your GWAC-amole in the fridge for about an hour (so the flavors can develop), plop it all onto a plate and make a round indentation in the mixture with the back of a spoon. Decoratively arrange a bit of the feta, mangoes and tomatoes in a ring in the hollowed part of the dip (I ran out of tomatoes!). Sprinkle a bit of seasoned salt on top for contrast, and fan out tortilla chips around it.

Ole! Enjoy!