No one needs a recipe for avo toast.

It’s all rather self-explanatory. You get avocado, you put it on toast and you shorten “avocado” to “avo” so you sound like a casual, laid-back Aussie.

Any boob could make avo toast but, just like tea, not everyone can make it exactly the way I like it.

I recently had a “let me make you a cup of tea” incident at work and I had to explain that I’m extremely particular about how I like my tea but with the professional finesse of not making my esteemed colleagues aware of the true chaotically and painfully meticulous nature that screams under the soundproof walls that is my skin. It was a delicate balance.

And despite my having an actual, shit-you-not degree in communications, I’m not particularly the best communicator when it comes to articulating what I want.

I don’t know what exactly it is about me. I mean, I feel nowhere near as smart as I did when I was a Year Seven student at a tiny Catholic school with like seven other people as competition, but I still have the vocabulary to sufficiently convert my thoughts into a string of syllables that resemble the English (albeit, somewhat Aussie-twinged) language.

Perhaps it’s the inability to balance the timid, people-pleaser in me with my repressed white-hot rage. I mean, it’s either an aggressive sigh in frustration or just accepting what is given to you – nay, finding a way to apologise for it – and stuttering thanks so not make waves. Perhaps this could feed into a lot of aspects of my life and, I suspect, the lives of a lot of regional-raised, white middle-class women out there who came of age in a time when everyone knew what a clitoris was but still didn’t seem to connect the dots that young women were sexual beings to whom intimacy was supposed to feel as good as their male counterparts. When the bar was set so low that the mere acknowledgement that sexual contact wasn’t supposed to be awful for women was cause for celebration. When teenage magazines told us matter-of-factly about the mechanics of our bodies but still published “how embarrasments” about having a tampon string hanging out of your tog bottoms. I mean, we were benefiting from centuries of progress, but we weren’t and, perhaps still aren’t, where we need to be.

* Also, pterodactyl starts with a silent P – who hecking knew?!

Anyway, rants aside, here’s how I’ve been eating my avo toast lately.

And, while we’re keeping the discussion going, it doesn’t mean this is how everyone likes to eat their avo toast. And it doesn’t mean this is the only way I like my avo toast. And it doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes opt for a pumpkin smash instead. It’s just how I’ve been eating it lately.

What you need to live like me:

Step 1: Toast a piece of dark rye bread. I mean, this isn’t the ridgey-didge rye with seeds and the grit of a dried out sponge, but the soften, commercialised kind you get from the bread aisle in the supermarket.

Step 2: Once it is toasted to your liking, scoop out about a third of  the flesh of an avocado with a spoon, being sure to keep the seed in and the seedless half as a lid for safe keeping in the fridge. I’ve no authority to say it, but I just feel it in my waters that you’re supposed to keep the seed in to stop the flesh from browning.

Step 3: Using a fork, mash it into the bread until it’s a chunky sludge.

Step 4: Dust with the boring, powder-fine black pepper your parents would use. I know ground pepper is trendy, but it doesn’t filter through the avo as evenly as its powdered incarnation.

Step 5: Crumble a pinch of sea salt flakes (here’s where you can get fancy) over the top.

Step 6: Mash again with a fork.

Step 7: Crumble about half a cube of that goats cheese that comes in a fancy glass jar with peppercorns and thyme – you know the brand I’m thinking of – over the toast.

Step 8: Sprinkle over about one-and-a-half pinches of pine nuts.

Step 9: Enjoy, maybe singing “sisters are doing it for themselves” to yourself between greedy bites.