kiwi wi-kend

I mentioned the other day that I’m in the middle of my three-week cooking series at Les Gourmettes. The first week was a Mother’s Day brunch menu and I needed kiwifruit for a fruit salad. Yes, I said “kiwifruit”, not just “kiwi”.  That is because kiwi is a bird and kiwifruit is … well, it’s a fruit!

Kiwifruit grows on vines and is named after the flightless kiwi bird, native to New Zealand, with hair-like brown feathers. They lay greenish-white eggs. Kiwi fruits are native to China, where they were originally called “macaque peach”.

Nutrition-wise, kiwifruits contain about as much potassium as bananas, are packed with more vitamin C than an equivalent amount of orange, and are also rich in Vitamins A and E. Plus the black seeds can be crushed to produce kiwi fruit oil, which is very rich in important Omega-3 essential fatty acid.

Since this is a cooking blog and not a blog about birds, it is safe to say that when you see “kiwi” in a recipe here, you can be 100% certain I’m talking about the fruit and not the bird.

So anyhow… back to the kiwi, I needed for my class.  I went to the grocery store and the price of kiwi was 2 for $1. I needed 10 kiwis and I wasn’t about to pay $5 for them. I remembered that I’d seen kiwi at Costco. Sure enough, there was a big carton for $5.59. When I say a big carton, I mean 30 kiwis!  That’s more than I needed, of course, but that’s not the point.  The point is, I wasn’t going to pay 50 cents each at one store when I could just as easily pay 19 cents each elsewhere.

Um, yeah, so now I have 20 kiwis sitting here that I have to try and find something to do with. So, it’s gonna be a kiwi weekend.

First up, how about a lesson on how to properly and easily peel a kiwi?

The first thing to do is to cut off both ends of the kiwi.  Insert a spoon between the skin and the flesh.

Grasp the fruit firmly in your hand and begin to turn the spoon in one direction and the fruit in the opposite direction.

Continue all the way around the fruit.

Push the flesh from the peel.

That’s all there is to it! Now you are ready to slice the kiwifruit and make a tasty little crostini, or krostini in this case.

This recipe uses 4 kiwis. So, four down, only 16 to go!

Kiwi Krostini

1 baguette, sliced on a diagonal into 1/3-inch thick slices
2 tablespoons olive oil
8-ounce container ciliegine (cherry size) fresh mozzarella balls, sliced
3 ounces thin-sliced prosciutto, each slice cut into four pieces
4 ripe kiwifruit, peeled and sliced
1 to 2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
Sea salt

Preheat broiler.  Place the baguette slices onto a baking sheet and brush with olive oil. Broil until baguette slices are lightly brown. Remove from oven and top with mozzarella. Return to oven and broil just until the cheese is beginning to melt.

Remove from oven and top with prosciutto and kiwi slices. Drizzle lightly with balsamic vinegar. Sprinkle each with a tiny pinch of sea salt. Take outside, weather permitting, and enjoy the lovely fresh air.

Makes about 24 crostini