How to get perfect avocados nearly every time (public service announcement)

California Girl here. Been eating avocados voraciously for over 65 years. Could have started even younger: some of my grandbabies, as it happens, loved them from the get-go.

Not hard to choose. Not hard to know when ready. Do this and you'll rarely go wrong.

1. Buy only rock-hard avocados. If you need something for today's salad, get something else instead. Ripe avocados in grocery stores are almost always bruised and turning brown inside. Maybe even stringy. Yuck. Bonus tip: Trader Joe's avocados are usually the best. Often the cheapest, too.

2. Let your avocado ripen on your countertop, in a bowl, or in a fruit basket, away from direct sunlight. Sometimes it takes only a day. Sometimes it takes a week. Be patient.

3. Check your avocado daily. To do this, apply very light pressure near the stem. When you feel a little give near the stem, the avocado is ready. Don't wait until the whole avocado feels soft.

4. Eat your avocado as soon as its ready. It will keep till dinnertime, but don't wait another day. As Elvis Presley said, Tomorrow will be too late ... it's now or never.

Avocado hacks
If you wait too long and the avocado is a bit too soft inside for your taste, scoop out the meat and mash it up with a little salt and a squirt of fresh lemon or lime juice (not too much). If you like, you can add finely diced tomato, chilies, and/or jicama. Maybe that's what you'd planned to do anyway. It will be fine.

If you cut too soon, stop cutting! You'll know after the initial stab if there's too much resistance. Close up the avocado, bind its wounds with duct tape (really! I am not making this up!), and leave it to ripen another day or two. There's a good chance it will be fine.

You may also want to check this out:
"How to fix an avocado without drawing blood"

How to fix an avocado without drawing blood (public service announcement)

From what I read online, apparently a lot of people are cutting themselves wide open while merely trying to fix guacamole.

This is foolishness, folks.

I am so bad with knives that for years my husband begged me not to take a knife skills class at the community college. He was afraid he'd never see me again.

And yet, though I have eaten avocados several times a week for decades, I have never ever succumbed to the newly popular avocado hand (and by the way, the advice in that linked article about how to cut an avocado is nonsense).

Here's how to open an avocado without inflicting bodily harm.

1. Be pretty sure it's ripe, but not too ripe. If you don't know how to tell, see my post "How to get perfect avocados nearly every time."

2. Use a smallish knife--longer than a paring knife but not one of those big cleaver things. I use a cheap grocery-store knife with a 4½" blade.

3. Slice the avocado in half lengthwise, as in the picture (do not cut the pit). This is not the part of fixing an avocado that sends people to the emergency room.

4. Peel both halves, using your fingers (not the knife). It's much easier to work with a peeled avocado.

Now the plot thickens. How do you get that huge pit out? This is where people stab themselves when they only ever meant to affix the pit to the point of the knife. Resist the temptation: that's not how to do it.

5. Take the avocado half with the pit and slice it lengthwise again (do not cut the pit). You can slice it in half, or you can make a number of thinner slices. Once you have sliced it, the pit is easy to remove.

Bottom line: don't try to take the pit out of the avocado. Take the avocado off the pit.

You'll be fine.