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Kiwi Is the Ingredient Your Guacamole Is Missing
Pandemic supermarket surplus(!) showed me you can be creative and have great snacks when things are upside-down
Here’s a thing that happened early in the pandemic: After people went crazy stockpiling, among empty supermarket shelves, there was a lone ingredient in the produce aisle — a lot of kiwis were left behind.
I don’t know why this is. I love kiwis. Every time I buy a kiwi I think, “Why don’t I buy kiwis all the time?” And then I don’t buy them again for a while.
Pretty much every kiwi I see in N.Y. markets comes from Italy. I hadn’t noticed that until kiwis were the majority of fruit in stores. I definitely thought kiwis came from New Zealand.
Kiwis originated in China and arrived in New Zealand in the early 1900s (the nickname “Kiwi” is about a flightless bird native to the country, not the fruit). New Zealand began exporting kiwis — initially called Chinese gooseberries — to the U.S. in the 1950s. Today, according to the California Kiwifruit Commission, California produces some 98 percent of the kiwi grown in the U.S. I guess they don’t travel east.
This is all to say, who among us knew anything about kiwis? Like, the skin of a kiwi is edible, contains a ton of fiber, and if you don’t peel it off, the fruit’s vitamin C content is better preserved. That sounds like a good thing.
The skin of a kiwi is edible, contains a ton of fiber, and if you don’t peel it off, the fruit’s vitamin C content is better preserved. That sounds like a good thing.
Anyway, after my first pandemic supermarket trip, I returned home with zero toilet paper, three blocks of Irish cheddar, two pints of strawberry ice cream, and many kiwis. At first, I ate them my usual way: quartered.
Then, looking to bolster some sad (read: not enough) guacamole, I diced a kiwi into the same size cubes as the more popular fruit and tossed them in. It…
