You can make avocado toast that rivals your favorite coffee shop in under 10 minutes.

I can’t lie. I bought into the avocado toast craze early — which prompted my close friends to scream things at me like, “Of course, you would order avocado toast; now you need some pumpkin spice cookies and a pumpkin spice-colored indoor scarf to match the socks you wear with your open toe Birkenstocks.”

I didn’t take offense. After all, I do love Birkenstocks. And feel totally comfortable slipping them on as I grade papers from my memoir students, blast Lil Durk from my portable speaker and take a massive chomp out of a piece of avocado toast. This is a perfect Tuesday for me.

How we approach, engage and have conversations about food is extremely important because putting limitations on what we eat is another way of putting limitations on ourselves and the communities we could potentially fellowship with. Unfortunately, I used to be that guy.

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The annoying friend who asks annoying questions like “why would you eat a green veggie burger,” or “why would anyone ever eat sushi? It’s not even cooked.”

This thought is hilarious now because I came up around people who would proudly eat a slab of pig ass, but have an aversion to sushi.

And even though I was insecure and in high school, this behavior was immature, unacceptable and the result of growing up in a family and a community that didn’t try anything that our parents or their parents did not try. Experiencing Indian cuisine was one of the first ethnic foods that forced me to learn and try more. Tikka masala and shrimp saag were close enough to what I was used to while being perfectly different enough to teach me how much I didn’t know.

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My biggest problem now is that there are so many foods to try and not enough life to do so. But while I’m here, I make sure that my daughter samples everything from Nigerian jollof and Korean barbeque to my special avocado toast.

My secret? Well, it is elementary; I grate the boiled egg.

Ingredients

1 egg

1 ripe avocado

¼ teaspoon of salt

1/2 lemon, juiced

½ teaspoon of ground black pepper

½ teaspoon of ground red pepper

1 tablespoon of butter

1 thick slice of sourdough bread

1 tablespoon of butter

½ cup of shredded white cheddar