Do you remember a few posts back when I shared my excitement over finally being able to grow something, besides herbs, in a garden?

Well, are you ready to see the surprise harvest?

The surprise is that I forgot what I’d planted. I thought it was zucchini and watermelon but turns out it was watermelon, cantaloupe, and English cucumber. This weekend I had another wonderful surprise!

The watermelon was not your run-of-the-mill red-fleshed watermelon, it is yellow!

I had completely forgotten I had planted the super cool yellow instead of the everyday red. I was overjoyed but honestly a little disappointed too.

Disappointed because I’d looked for yellow watermelon in the market when I was creating the Harmony Board for Lisa’s birthday last week but I could not find any. And there it was – in my own backyard the entire time. Doggone it!

When shopping for the board, I may not have found the melon I wanted, but I did find yellow kiwi at Costco. Did you even know there was such a thing? I discovered it a couple of summers ago, but this was the first time I saw it at Costco. The green kiwi is the smaller fuzzy one on the left. The yellow is slightly larger and has no fuzz.

Just as with the watermelon, they taste much like their everyday cousins.

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Watermelon and summer go hand-in-hand. Here’s a fun way to serve it up!

This recipe comes from an image I found on Pinterest. It is important to use full fat, not lite, coconut milk. Lite coconut milk will not whip.

Placing the coconut milk in the refrigerator overnight is also a must. It will cause the cream to separate from the milk. The thick cream is used, and the milk is poured off.

If you’d rather skip the coconut cream altogether, I have another Watermelon “Cake” photo from Pinterest at the end of the post, no recipe is needed for it.

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Isn’t this centerpiece, featuring a kiwifruit, so very pretty? I found the image on Pinterest, it comes from Style Me Pretty and Anna Costa Photographers. Consider it my gift to all you wonderful moms out there, especially my Mother-in-Law, Patricia Hopkins! We love you!  xoxoxo

Happy Mother’s Day.

This year marks my first Mother’s Day not having at least one of my kids home with me.

I was actually expecting to feel all sad and sorry for myself, but that would be ridiculous! I have managed to raise two of the most amazing people on Earth.

I adore them and I know that they love me. So what’s to fret about?

If you have your kids with you today, be sure to appreciate that fact, and if you don’t – it’s OK – sit back, relax, enjoy a kiwi mojito, and know that you are blessed. xoxo

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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?

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