I’m a child of the 70s; I grew up surrounded by avocado and gold furnishings. I watched the Brady Bunch on a pre-cable, pre-remote control tube television that had a large antenna and 13 channels on a dial. I listened to Free to Be You and Me without a trace of irony. I wore T-shirts emblazoned with the image of the Kool-Aid man. I ate Pop Rocks, splashed myself with Jean Nate fragrance, washed my hair with Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific, and had a crush on Adam Rich, the shaggy-haired kid from Eight is Enough.
And, like every 1970s girl worth her Dr. Scholl’s, I carried a Bonne Bell Lip Smacker lip gloss with me, on a rope around my neck. My favorite flavor? Watermelon.
All of which is simply a long, nostalgic way of saying that I’ve always had a thing for watermelon, real or fake.
These days, though, I’m trying to take in more real, less fake. Fortunately, with watermelon, that’s no problem; I could eat an entire fresh watermelon by the scoopful, oh yes I could.
(FYI, My 70s watermelon memories include the real stuff, too: at one church picnic, my dad karate-chopped open an entire melon with a single swipe of his hand. I searched for a video of someone attempting this, and instead got stuck at this video of a Bulgarian woman karate-chopping a watermelon and wooden boards with her enormous gazoongas. Do I love the internets at this moment? Or do I hate the internets? I honestly do not know ).
Watermelon? Not just good for nostalgia; it’s also good for you. It contains massive amounts of lycopene, piles of vitamins A, C, B1, B6, minerals, amino acids, and plenty of other goodness. Watermelon is high in citrulline, an amino acid our bodies use to make another amino acid, arginine, which is kind of like nature’s own Viagra. Va va va voom.
If you’re like, Watermelon? Meh. then don’t bother reading any more. Just clickie-clickie over to the watermelon knocker-chop instead. (Go ahead. You know you wanna’). But if you, like me, are all about watermelon, and you’re totally psyched that the warm weather is here at last, then maybe you want to join me in making some Lip-Smackin’ Watermelon-ade, this summer’s most refreshing drink.
You will need:
Half a big’ ol’ watermelon
2-3 Limes
4-6 leaves fresh mint, plus garnish
3 teaspoons sugar
Salt (yes, salt. I know. It’s weird) – to taste, no more than 1/4 teaspoon per half-watermelon.
Chopped mint
Directions: scoop out chunks of watermelon, place in blender. The smaller the chunks, the easier the blending process will go. I was able to do about a quarter-watermelon at a time. Squeeze in juice of limes. Add coarsely chopped mint. Blend.
Strain the pureed watermelon into a pitcher. Surely there is a tool that will make this simple. Me? I jerry-rigged something using a strainer:
Add water to thin it out slightly — I used one part water to three parts watermelon juice.
Add sugar, or don’t, if you prefer to avoid added sweetener.
At this point, friends, I thought it was good, but sort of…empty. It needed something to harmonize the flavors. I kept thinking, salt. It needs salt. So darned if I didn’t add a tiny bit of salt, and darned if it didn’t make the whole thing better. Add salt to taste. Garnish with chopped mint before serving.
If you like watermelon, you’ll totally like this. It’s refreshing, it’s got a great color, and you will feel kind of fancy as you serve it to your summertime guests. I made it for guests recently, and everyone dug it. With the exception of Blair, who is kind of Watermelon. Meh. Turns out he is also kind of Watermelon-ade. Meh. But if you like watermelon, and mint, and lime, you’ll totally like it. It would be lovely paired with seltzer, as a watermelon spritzer. Or better yet, pair it with some citron vodka and make yourself a killer watermelon martini. Who said that? Did I say that?.
(Or rather, who drank that? Did I drink that?)
Update: Tom, the official (and always amusing) “That Guy” of the Cleaner Plate Club, is correct: this is not a martini. To satisfy the linguistic purists among us, we have hereby named the drink the Aliquarium. Feel free to make many references to getting tanked as you drink it.
When you’re buying your watermelon, there are two main things to look for: (1) it should have a buttery yellow spot on the flesh, from where it sat on the ground, getting ripened by the sun, and (2) it should also feel heavy for its size — a sign that it’s plenty juicy and fresh. Watermelon will be at its peak ripeness later this month. I, for one, can’t wait.
It ain’t Bonne Bell, but it’s just as lip-smackin’.
I hate to say it but my first thought (before I was finished reading) was “Oooh, add some vodka and it’d be an awesome martini!”
Hahahahahahahaha!!
Thanks for the recipe!
Watermelon Bonne Bell Lip Smacker–absolutely the best flavor. So much better than the Dr. Pepper one. Thanks for bringing up a cool memory.
I’m definitely trying out this receipe ASAP. Sounds yummy!
(Oh, and Free To Be You and Me was pretty much my Bible growing up. Another cool memory. Thanks!)
I am so going to try this in the next week. Maybe I could get a potato masher and let the kids be in charge of smooshing the watermelon.
clack clack clack…that’s the sound of my dr scholl’s as i scamper to the kitchen for a martini glass…
Thank you for this! My son LOVES watermelon but can only eat so much. . .I’d love to try this. I bet it would freeze into a popsicle really well too.
Oooohhh, I like the watermelon martini idea! I’ll have to try the virgin and not-so-virgin versions of this. I made your meatloaf the other night (w/spinach, kale,etc.) and the boys (all 3!) loved it! I must say, it was the best meatloaf I’ve ever made – thank you so much for the recipe! Loving your blog… we must do dinner again soon – oh yeah, and a playdate!
-Janine
definitely will try the martini version
and i don’t think salt on watermelon is weird at all – watermelon is such a delicate flavor, i find salting my slices of watermelon really helps bring out the flavor. i put salt on watermelon and black pepper on cantaloupe… learned it from my grandfather from Indiana. and no, i don’t put anything on honeydew!
You and Bossy must have grown up the same year with the same habits.
That is a GREAT (and intuitive, but gee, I would not have thought of it) tip about looking for the yellow spot to identify sun-ripened watermelon. another gem from Ali! thank you!!
I don’t want to be That Guy – Oh, who am I kidding? I am That Guy. I live to be That Guy (“That Guy” being an obsessive compulsive, anal retentive, supremely annoying linguistic purist). I hereby embrace my That Guyness – but a watermelon-vodka cocktail is emphatically not a martini.
Martini = gin + vermouth in a subjectively comfortable ratio, garnished with olives (lemon as an allowable alternative). Vodka + vermouth is an acceptable, if bastard, variant. If you want to stray from the beaten path of this basic recipe, yet still remain within the bounds of martinidom, there are really only two options available to you: the Gibson (replace with olives with cocktail onions) or the dirty martini (toss in some olive brine). That’s the absolute limit of martiniosity.
Apple”tini?” Not a martini? Chocola”tini?” Also not a martini. The pomegrana”tini” similarly fails to qualify, as do the peanut butter and jelly”tini,”the café au lai”tini,” the spaghetti carbonara”tini,” and any other half-assed variant some struggling actor slash bartender concocts on a slow night at PDQ McLushie’s.
Your watermelon cooler, which sounds like a lovely libation, therefore needs a different name. At least it does if you accept my premise (and why wouldn’t you?). Might I suggest the Ali, the Ali-yum (good name, except for the, you know, the onion-y connotation of the word ‘allium’), the Aliquarium, or the Ali-Oop?
Tom, you are so totally That Guy. Point taken – not a martini. Stickler.
But hey! I vote for Aliquarium, because then when I drink it, I can make lots of references to getting tanked.
It’s done. I will update with a note. Not a tini, Just a quarium. An Aliquarium.
I see that you did some serious research on melons, human and otherwise. What’s next, coconuts?
Looks really good; will try.
Avocado and gold furnishings?
Adam Rich…pffft. I have to admit that it was Mary Bradford for me and, even more embarrassingly, I later fell for Tom’s second wife Abby
I like watermelon though I am not fond of all the seeds.
Completely unrelated to this post, I just ran across this website: http://www.allergykids.com/ and I was wondering if you’d seen it before and what your thoughts were.
Hi, Andrea – yeah, I know those guys. I read up on them in January and did a little post on it: http://cleanerplateclub.wordpress.com/2008/01/17/food-allergy-link/
My first thought is that I can’t know if the specifics of the argument are correct or not. Nobody can. There’s not enough data. There’s correlation, but that’s not “evidence.” We’re just not doing sufficient research. And even if we WERE doing large-scale, long-term testing on these different additives and GMOs, we’d be doing that testing in isolation. In the real world, different things interact in ways that are unpredictable.
But I think their overall message with regard to food is a wise one: stay away from processed crap. Stay away from ingredients you can’t pronounce. We’re putting this stuff in our bodies, in our children’s bodies. There’s some compelling research from England (Google “Southampton study additives”) that this stuff really does affect kids on some profound levels. And in the end, there’s no downside whatsoever to the “alternative” to processed foods – with real food, it’s all upside (except, of course, for the convenience factor).
I get a more nervous once we start talking about vaccines, though, because there’s clearly a downside to the alternative. I have to admit, my perspective comes in part from the fact that I lived for almost two years in a developing nation where kids AREN’T routinely vaccinated. I have seen that these diseases are real, that they are gruesome, they sometimes kill children, they often cripple them, and that the human immune system can only do so much to fight these diseases off. My own kids are vaccinated. Did I cringe and cross my fingers as those mysterious (to me) shots went in to their tiny bodies? Oh, yes. I hated it. HATED it. But did I do it? Absolutely.
Thanks for bringing that to my attention again. Mostly, I’m glad that they’re hollering about these additives and GMOs. For way too long, nobody hollered.
(and to jenniwd, AKA Mom: do you not remember the avocado green couch we sat on for years? The rough one, with the torn covers? That sat in front of the avocado green stretched batiky canvas? Or the gold sculpture of fish that hung on the wall? We had our share of green-gold decor. Oh, yes. I’m not 100% — this one might be a mis-remember — but didn’t we even have a gold oven at one point? Just watch: it will all come back into style within a few years).
Thanks for the info, Ali! I must’ve missed your post in January, which was right around the time my daughter was born, so my internetting was spotty. Back now to read what you wrote.
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