I’ve always been one to play with my food.
Even when I was younger, and much to my parents disapproval, I would always be building things with it, cutting it with scissors instead of using a knife, and mixing things that weren’t ‘supposed’ to go together.
Not much has changed.
It’s the height of watermelon season and I just can’t get enough of the stuff. It’s one of those fruits that’s quintessentially summer, along with summer berries, iced drinks and fresh cold salads.
I might have mentioned before that I don’t have an ice cream maker, and that’s made me seek out other ways to make and enjoy ice creams over the years. Although not technically an ‘ice cream’, granita is such a simple and fun way to enjoy an iced treat as it’s so easy to make, and is perfect if you have plenty of fruit, plus, it looks great served up in glasses. I’ve kept this recipe very simple as I didn’t want to interfere with the pure watermelon flavour, so the only other ingredient is sugar, as watermelon loses sweetness once frozen.
Another quick and easy dessert to make is this watermelon soup. I’ve used exactly the same recipe as for the granita, so it’s great if you have an abundance of fruit - you can make one big batch, and just split the juice between the frozen granita and the refrigerated soup.
Isn’t it funny how the taste and textures of certain foods change according to how they’re cut? For this dessert soup, I used a melon baller to make some watermelon balls which I added to the soup. For me, watermelon soup always tastes better when served with watermelon balls.
For the last recipe, I made a simple fruit salad using only 3 ingredients that work really well together: watermelon, starfruit, and dill. This was actually a recipe I tried to include in the fruit salad series in my magazine, but unfortunately I ran out of time, so couldn’t include it in there, but I did have a lot of fun making it for this blog post.
I couldn’t resist playing with the shapes of these fruits, and using a star-shaped cookie cutter to cut stars out of the watermelon to complement the shapes of the starfruit. You can also fix the watermelon stars onto the side of your granita glasses just before serving.
Enjoy!
