The unusually wet summer here produced a huge volume of mosquitoes and melons all at once despite farmers separating their plantings by weeks. This year one of my favorite new melons was the Yellow Summer Doll Watermelon. It is incredibly sweet like most watermelons but the color after it’s blended into a drink is what makes it the most fun to make and the few seeds that there are seemed to be concentrated in areas when you make the cuts on the melon.
All of these melons have slight variations on the amount of lime you will need to use. It really depends on the sweetness and intensity of the year’s crop and your desire for a bit of contrast provided by the lime. This recipe was tested on cantaloupe, pink & yellow watermelons.
Late Summer Coolers
Ingredients
- 8 cups of cubed Cantaloupe or Watermelon without seeds
- 1/4 cup lime juice
Preparation
- Using a bar blender, fill your blender with 1-2″ chunks of melon, minus the seeds if you’re using watermelon.
- Add about 1/4 cup of lime juice or a little less if you are timid about the flavor.
- Blend until it’s all smooth.
- Refrigerate and serve over ice topped with a sprig of mint or lemon verbena.
Notes
This doesn’t need any sweetener. And if you strain it like many recipes call for, it becomes thin and you lose about 1/2 of the volume which is not very economical. Blending ice into it just makes the flavor too thin. If you chill before serving the ice won’t melt as quickly and you’ll get the full flavor coming through. I think you could freeze this into a slushy drink as well if you have kids and send it in their lunch box. And it’s possible to freeze melon in the raw so you could have these drinks on unusually warm fall or early spring days or for a summer themed party in the middle of winter.
