Guacamole

One more reason to be thankful for the Super Bowl: It prevents a glut of guacamole. According to the California Avocado Commission, chip-dippers will consume 25 million California avocados during Super Bowl week - enough to make 12 million pounds of guacamole. That's enough guacamole to bury a football field, including the end zones, 17 inches deep, the commission calculates. "No other single American event impacts the sale of avocados like the Super Bowl," said Mark Affleck, commission president.

When you walk through the funky green doors at 422 South St., you may not be sure whether you've just entered a clothing store or a party. Bright colors pop out at you from all directions. A comfy old couch, Oriental rugs, beaded curtains, even a parakeet in a Victorian birdcage give the space a bohemian look. Patrons sporting platinum blond 'dos, purple lipstick, four-inch silver platform soles and black fishnet stockings check out red rubber jumpers and black vinyl pants. All the while, a hypnotic beat undulates through the crowd.

Food : Tacos and burritos for breakfast, lunch and dinner from local dude Tom McCusker. Find it: He started with wheels, but nowadays McCusker has a shop at 261 S. 44th St., open daily. Look for: Starting April 21, his original, psychedelic, skull-painted truck will reappear weekends at Clark Park Farmer's Market, 43rd Street and Baltimore Avenue. Around for : As of April 1, three years. Eat: Breakfast tacos made him famous, and justifiably so. Made with potatoes, eggs, cheese and homemade guacamole, they're slightly addictive.

Dear Polly: We love to serve guacamole at parties, but when I make it ahead of time, the top of the mixture always turns brown and bitter. Is there a way to prevent this? - Ann Ah, guacamole! Avocado ecstasy on a tortilla chip! Here are a couple of ways to keep it bright and cheerful-looking: Put a piece of plastic wrap directly onto the surface of the dip. Be sure it clings uniformly with no air pockets or gaps. If, for some reason, you don't want to press plastic onto the dip (for example, if you've molded and decorated the guacamole and want to preserve the surface)

Cook's Simple and Seasonal Cuisine (Simon & Schuster, $18.95) is designed for people who enjoy letting the seasons dictate the foods that come out of their kitchens. This is the newest in a series of cookbooks from Cook's magazine. Many of the dishes are from prominent chefs, such as Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, while others come from the likes of the United Fishermen's Wives of New Bedford, Mass. The recipes are a simple approach to an expanding American cuisine. The influence of Mexican and other international fare can be felt throughout the pages, and a prominent role is played by regional cooking.

For people who enjoy reading about food as well as cooking and eating it, Marian Burros has collected her best columns from the New York Times and put them together in The Best of De Gustibus (Simon & Schuster, $19.95). The book's title is taken from the name of her Times column, and that name comes from the Latin phrase de gustibus non est disputandum ("there is no disputing about tastes"). More than 60 recipes serve to illustrate the collection. Readers of her columns could well find a forgotten favorite in this anthology or one that they missed.

It has been a long time since I ordered a meal and it arrived in less than a minute. It was fairly complicated food, too, or at least looked to be. There was the guacamole dip, for instance, with its grilled tortillas arranged like daisy petals. A small mountain of guacamole also appeared on our fajita. But that was OK: It was delicious and tasted very pure except for a little lemon and onion. Another night of dining in a Mexican restaurant? Not likely. It was a sultry evening just before sundown at Desert Moon, part of a nine-year-old franchise based in Valley Cottage, N.Y., that prides itself in breaking out of the assembly-line dining niche.

Another day, another life-changing Rashomon. The scene set by the new Megan Mostyn-Brown play The Bends presents a typical collection of 30-ish professionals in middle-class Chicago, eating conventional guacamole - but with hugely different recollections of a seismic event that sent them careening away from each other. For all its nonthreatening surfaces, the story unfolding at Saturday's Flashpoint Theatre Company opening is a serious descendant of The Visit (successful woman returns home where men have done her wrong)

My tablemate at Hurricane Alley on South Street glanced at her watch and gasped. We'd been there four hours; it felt like two. Where had the time gone? Part of it had rolled away while we waited a little too long for food and drinks; the rest had vanished in the enjoyment of the colorful surroundings and mood-making pre-recorded jazz. Hurricane Alley, a less costly adjunct to the N'awlins-themed Cafe Nola, is named for the path a hurricane takes churning from the Caribbean to the Gulf of Mexico.

While we lament summer's last gasp, we rejoice in the coming of the big-time, multicultural festival as the Great Plaza celebrates Mexican Independence Day on SUNDAY. From noon to 7 p.m., various regions in Mexico - including Veracruz, Jalisco, the ancient city of Teotihuacan, Sonora, Durango and Puebla Mexico - will interpret their liberation from Spain through folk dances, traditional costumes and other means. The Mexican consul, the Honorable Manuel Lombera himself, will be assisted by the Honorable Mayor Rendell himself, in conducting the Ceremony of El Grito, which includes the same call to arms uttered by Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla on Sept.

Another day, another life-changing Rashomon. The scene set by the new Megan Mostyn-Brown play The Bends presents a typical collection of 30-ish professionals in middle-class Chicago, eating conventional guacamole - but with hugely different recollections of a seismic event that sent them careening away from each other. For all its nonthreatening surfaces, the story unfolding at Saturday's Flashpoint Theatre Company opening is a serious descendant of The Visit (successful woman returns home where men have done her wrong)

Food : Tacos and burritos for breakfast, lunch and dinner from local dude Tom McCusker. Find it: He started with wheels, but nowadays McCusker has a shop at 261 S. 44th St., open daily. Look for: Starting April 21, his original, psychedelic, skull-painted truck will reappear weekends at Clark Park Farmer's Market, 43rd Street and Baltimore Avenue. Around for : As of April 1, three years. Eat: Breakfast tacos made him famous, and justifiably so. Made with potatoes, eggs, cheese and homemade guacamole, they're slightly addictive.

One block east of the Bomb Bomb Bar-be-que Grill in deep South Philly (four blocks before Oregon), you encounter what is ostensibly a Mexican corner grocery, necklaced in car-lot pennants, the exterior, in this case, a brash habanero-orange. It is not immediately apparent here at Los Gallos, 10th and Wolf, but behind the stacked tortillas and bottles of pickled corn smut (the prized Mexican fungus called huitlacoche) , there resides a tiny taqueria, itching to make its move.

One of the interesting trends in the last decade has been the emergence of strip-mall restaurants in the suburbs going beyond chains and pizza. It's a good thing, as Martha would say. Especially when the business is a small, family effort and the food is something other than ubiquitous Italian. For solid Mexican fare, San Miguel in Sewell, N.J., is one of those mall-crawl finds. Owner Miguel Padilla and his mother bring a taste of their Gulf Coast homeland in Tampico, Mexico, to Egg Harbor Road.

It has been a long time since I ordered a meal and it arrived in less than a minute. It was fairly complicated food, too, or at least looked to be. There was the guacamole dip, for instance, with its grilled tortillas arranged like daisy petals. A small mountain of guacamole also appeared on our fajita. But that was OK: It was delicious and tasted very pure except for a little lemon and onion. Another night of dining in a Mexican restaurant? Not likely. It was a sultry evening just before sundown at Desert Moon, part of a nine-year-old franchise based in Valley Cottage, N.Y., that prides itself in breaking out of the assembly-line dining niche.

Being from the South, I tasted true Mexican food only once growing up. The softer side of the cuisine, Tex-Mex, is what I was raised to love. So it was a pleasant surprise to discover the authentic dishes at El Sarape, a homage to co-owner Luis Marin's native Mexico City. The first thing you need to know about El Sarape is this: Eventually, the mariachi player will leave your table side and move to someone else's. Don't get me wrong - he's a mood-setter. With walls covered in black-and-white photos of Mexico and a happening tequila bar, El Sarape is a festive place for lunch or dinner.

Christie Whitman has committed some of the Bush administration's biggest gaffes to date - most infamously, her ill-fated crusade to drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions at all costs to thwart alleged global warming. Bush Republicans are right to thwack Whitman for espousing a radical agenda that defies basic principles of limited government and economic common sense. But I'm not going to join the pinata party. There is no sport in assaulting such an easy target. The liberal Republican ex-governor of New Jersey and current head of the Environmental Protection Agency has never hidden her true colors.

When you walk through the funky green doors at 422 South St., you may not be sure whether you've just entered a clothing store or a party. Bright colors pop out at you from all directions. A comfy old couch, Oriental rugs, beaded curtains, even a parakeet in a Victorian birdcage give the space a bohemian look. Patrons sporting platinum blond 'dos, purple lipstick, four-inch silver platform soles and black fishnet stockings check out red rubber jumpers and black vinyl pants. All the while, a hypnotic beat undulates through the crowd.

While we lament summer's last gasp, we rejoice in the coming of the big-time, multicultural festival as the Great Plaza celebrates Mexican Independence Day on SUNDAY. From noon to 7 p.m., various regions in Mexico - including Veracruz, Jalisco, the ancient city of Teotihuacan, Sonora, Durango and Puebla Mexico - will interpret their liberation from Spain through folk dances, traditional costumes and other means. The Mexican consul, the Honorable Manuel Lombera himself, will be assisted by the Honorable Mayor Rendell himself, in conducting the Ceremony of El Grito, which includes the same call to arms uttered by Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla on Sept.

Lately my life feels like the squeeze is on and I'm the orange. No matter how I plan, no matter how early I rise, there is not enough time to raise my son, keep my house clean, work a full-time job, and have a good time. This is not even factoring in the strange recurrence of an additional task called dinner, which arrives at our house each night, invited or not. It's because time is spare that I've begun experimenting with shortcuts. And when it comes to dinner, some of those shortcuts have been inspired by cans with attractive labels and cute little boxes with sometimes hefty price tags.