Tip-sy Tuesday: prosciutto

I made pears with Boursin cheese wrapped in prosciutto the other day and discovered an easy way to cut the prosciutto into strips. Let's back up a sec - have you worked with prosciutto before? It's Italian dry-cured ham usually sliced super thin and it's a great addition to a charcuterie board, you can crisp it and add to dishes, add it fresh to fruit salad or on top of bruschetta - lots of ways to eat and serve it. One of my favorite is to wrap thin strips of it around pears, it makes for a nice appetizer or snack. Well when it's sliced so thin and then packaged, it can stick together and it's soooooo hard to separate the slices - I love when it's packaged with thin sheets of plastic between the slices, it's easier to separate but still hard to handle. So when making these pears, or any time you want to slice the prosciutto, I've found that if I leave a slice on the plastic and then cut it with scissors before peeling it off the plastic, it's so much easier. 

If you buy prosciutto without anything between the slices, I wish you lots of luck ;) 

Only thing you have to be aware of is to remove all the plastic from the prosciutto before eating the prosciutto!

For the pear appetizer: Slice a washed pear in quarters, remove the core. I leave the peel on, feel free to remove if you prefer. Cut each quarter into 3 slices. Put a small teaspoon of soft, creamy Boursin cheese on each pear slice, don't spread it around just leave it in a ball in the middle of the pear slice. Cut each slice of prosciutto in 3 slices lengthwise. Carefully peel the prosciutto off the plastic and wrap around a cheese topped pear slice. Refrigerate until ready to serve. Note: the prosciutto is so thin that it'll still probably fall apart and that's fine, they tend to stick to each other so just wrap the pieces around the pear even if it's not one long strip. 

see the pears on the left and lower right sides of this
appetizer wreath originally posted 12/18. click here
to see how to put the wreath together.