When I buy avocados they sometimes take up to a week to ripen. When I lived in the United States, I would put the avocados in the gas oven with the pilot light left on and the low heat helped them ripen, but now I have an electric oven. Can you help?
Wrap the avocados loosely in a paper bag or newspaper with a couple of apples or almost-ripe bananas and leave at room temperature. The apples and bananas produce ethylene, a gas that helps the avocados ripen. If you have a microwave oven, give each avocado a 15-second blast before wrapping it: warming the fruit first triggers the ripening process. Don't wrap the fruit tightly; there should be room for it to breathe and for the ethylene to circulate. And don't use a plastic bag, which will cause the fruit to rot.
We seem to encounter insurmountable problems when making meringue. The most prevalent problem is a sticky, caramelised bottom. Making it during humid weather is also a problem. Please advise.
A meringue recipe looks simple - basically egg whites whipped with sugar - but it can be temperamental. The meringue can 'weep' liquid, shrink or shrivel and turn chewy. As you've noticed, it's more difficult in humid weather because the meringue absorbs moisture from the air.
Any meringue must be shaped and cooked as soon as it's whipped. If the raw meringue sits, the sugar combines with the moisture in the whites to form a syrup, which leaches out of the bottom because it's heavier than the whipped whites. This is the most likely reason for the sticky bottom of your meringue. Have everything ready so the meringue can be baked immediately - and don't forget to preheat the oven.
Because the syrup on your meringue is caramelised, it's possible you're baking at too high a temperature. Because hard meringue (for dishes such as pavlova or dacquoise) has a high sugar content (about 1/4 cup for each large egg white), it must bake at a low temperature so it dries out instead of browning. The meringue should have a long, slow bake at approximately 100 degrees Celsius. Check the accuracy of the oven with an oven thermometer (available from Panhandler, tel: 2523 1672).