I’ve been wanting to make pickled watermelon rind and am delighted to have an organic melon for just that purpose. Can I convince you to give pickling a try?
Martha McMillin of The Preserving Place suggests wrapping pickled watermelon rind in prosciutto for a great Southern twist on the traditional melon-prosciutto combination. Yum.
This martini recipe came from the folks at East Atlanta Village Farmers Market. It’s from food blog Glue & Glitter. The original recipe called for watermelon, but it would work with any melon that came in your box. I got watermelon, I know there were other varieties as well.
The next time we have a watermelon I’ll give you a recipe for making watermelon rind pickles, but love this idea from Fine Cooking magazine for a watermelon rind relish. No canning required! The recipe calls for 1/2 of a jalapeno, but of course you can vary that by the tolerance for heat in your household. Although I have to say, every jalapeno I’ve cooked with this year has been pretty spicy! This should keep pretty well in your refrigerator – maybe for a month? 1 (4-pound). watermelon
I will probably just eat my waternelon in big chunks, but if you want to do something different, this lovely salad idea from Bill Smith of Crook’s Corner restaurant in Chapel Hill, North Carolina is a nice combination of sweet, spicy and sour.
Not sure why, but this week’s box has set me to thinking about sweets. Maybe not the traditional reaction to the bounty of squash, cucumbers and greens, but there you are. What may have pushed me to the sweet side was the huge bunch of basil in my box. “Hmm … more pesto? Nah. Chop some into a salad with the beans and potatoes? Ok. But there’s LOTS of basil …”
And then I remembered a drink I discovered last summer, the watermelon-basil margarita. The recipe came out in Martha Stewart Living back in 2007, and like lots of people, I had torn it out and added it to that stack of “recipes I will get to one day”. Well, “one day” came last summer and what a hit! People who were totally not going to try it ended up loving it and we were muddling basil leaves all night long. Here’s the recipe.
A quick note about the melons, if it isn’t too late – don’t throw away the seeds. Grinding them up in drinks like liquados is a traditional Mexican technique. The seeds become a thickener. This recipe was adapted from one published in Gourmet in 2008.
I’ve been experimenting with cold soups this week, and I’m really enjoying these two options which use a number of items from this week’s box.
I‘ve been a huge fan of gazpacho since my first taste at the Peasant Uptown at Phipps Plaza (which means I’m really dating myself since they’ve been closed for years). Spicy, flavorful tomato gazpacho, topped with shrimp … and served with their cheese toast …. it opened my eyes to the pleasures of cold soup. Now most summers I keep a half gallon jar of gazpacho in the refrigerator as soon as the tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers come in.
Recently I’ve been seeing recipes for watermelon gazpacho, and this week I finally tried it out. Delicious! Here’s one way to make it, but I’ve seen it demonstrated by chefs at local farmers’ markets using many variations including adding tomatoes, using more hot peppers, or varying herbs like using dill. I liked this recipe because it used what I have in my garden and box right now. You could leave out the crab, or substitute shrimp. The sweet seafood is a nice foil for the spicy fruitiness of the soup.