How to Pick a Perfect Watermelon {+ 101 Amazing Watermelon Ideas}

Knowing how to pick a perfect watermelon isn’t a magic trick. Just remember: Girls are sweeter, size matters, and your Mama was probably right.

The picture above is one of my all time favorites. It was taken on a sweltering July night in the summer of 1995, in my Uncle Russel’s backyard in Maryville, Missouri. The little girl on the left looking straight into the camera grew up to be a dedicated, compassionate teacher, and her sister is now a talented photographer with a gift for capturing light. This image recalls one of my fondest memories from their childhood, and the second best watermelon I’ve ever eaten in my life.

For the record, the best watermelon I’ve ever eaten was on the shores of Spirit Lake in the shadow of Mount St. Helens, a few years before she blew her top. It was the first of my “coming-of-age” summers, and I still remember the boy I was sitting with. (His name was Shawn, and he was beautiful.)

Coincidentally, the third best watermelon I’ve ever eaten was, like the second, grown and eaten in Missouri… and even as I type that, it occurs to me that my summer memories are as entwined with the feels and flavors of ripe watermelon as a field of vines in the late summer sun.

How to Pick a Perfect Watermelon

Hey, remember that summer we had that mealy, grainy, flavorless watermelon? How ’bout we go find one just like it and relive the moment!
~ No One Ever

If you’re like me, eating watermelon isn’t always just about eating watermelon. Sometimes, one cool, juicy bite can take you back to times and places and loved ones long gone, and bring them into clear focus for a sweet moment. No one wants to a mealy, grainy, flavorless melon – it cheats you out of both the moment and the memory.

Here are a few easy tips to help you pick a perfect watermelon:

Check the “Field Spot.”

The yellow spot, known as the field spot, is the place where the watermelon rested on the ground as it was growing. The yellower the spot, the riper the melon. A ripe watermelon will have a creamy yellow or orange-yellow spot. If the field spot is white or very pale yellow, choose another melon.

Look for “Webbing.”

When you see weblike brown spots on the watermelon, it means that bees touched the pollinating parts of the flower many times. The more pollination, the sweeter the fruit.

Avoid bumps & blemishes.

Other than webbing, note any lumps, dents, soft spots, or other irregularities. If the melon you’re considering is covered with blemishes or bumps, choose another.

Girls are sweeter.

Did you know that there are male and female watermelons? Male watermelons are more elongated, usually bigger, and can have a flat, watery flavor. Female watermelons are usually rounder and sweeter.

Size matters.

Don’t go for the biggest or smallest melon in a group: try to choose an average sized melon that feels heavy for its size. A ripe watermelon will feel heavier than one that is less ripe. (I use this trick for choosing oranges, too.)

Check the tail.

If your melon still has its tail, check to be sure it has dried up. If it’s still green, it means the watermelon was picked too early. Similarly, the surface of the melon will turn from shiny to dull when the melon is ripe.

Thump it!

Your Mama knew what she was doing! Go ahead and give it a good knuckle-thump, and then take note of how it sounds. You want to hear a deep, hollow sound. If the sound is dull, the fruit likely isn’t quite ripe.

Now that you’ve picked out your perfect watermelon, here are 101 things you can do with it!

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The Lazy Caretaker’s Guide to Sourdough

January 6 By Renée ♥ 13 Comments

I have a dirty little secret: I don’t feed my sourdough starter regularly. At all. Mostly it just sits in a jar in the back of my fridge under a little puddle of hooch, waiting for me to get a yen to make something sour-doughy.

My sourdough use waxes and wanes in bouts that can last weeks, or even months. In waxing cycles, when I am baking bread nearly every day, a loaf rarely hits the cooling rack before someone slices off an end. We have homemade bread for our sandwiches and for our soup. We take it in our lunches and feast on it warm with slathers of peanut butter and sprinkles of sugar.

But then I lose interest, and months can go by before I even give it a second thought again. Then Oh, what great consternation arises among certain citizens of our household! I get this a lot: “Mom, that jar of sourdough looks disgusting! If you aren’t going to use it, then just throw it away!”

Never!

I know good sourdough parents don’t have this problem. They feed their starter regularly, and they bake a loaf every three days like clockwork. This post isn’t for them. It is for the rest of us. The negligent. The lackadaisical. The throngs of home bakers who avoid sourdough altogether because they instinctively know that the waning times will come to them as well, and they just don’t want to deal with the guilt.

Well, guess what? No one needs to feel guilty. No me. Not you. Because a good sourdough starter will stay alive in the fridge with very little maintenance for extremely long periods of time, and can easily be activated when you want to use it. (OK, not really “right when” you want to use it: you need to plan about a day in advance.) Here’s my very easy protocol for waking a sleepy starter:

How to Wake a Sleeping Sourdough Starter

Put one tablespoon of starter into a non-metallic bowl. Stir in one ounce each of filtered water and flour. (I use a kitchen scale.) Allow to sit at room temperature for 8 hours.
After 8 hours, measure the starter (preferably on a kitchen scale). Add equal parts filtered water and flour. (i.e., If I have 2 ounces of starter, I add 2 ounces each of water and flour.) Let sit at room temperature for another 8 hours.
Repeat Step 2.

The total “revival” process takes about 24 hours, at which time my starter is usually bubbly, percolating and ready to use. If yours isn’t, try one more feeding and check again.

How to Care for Your {Sourdough} Mother

Even the laziest sourdough caretaker must do a little maintenance. (I don’t know how long it takes to really “kill” a sourdough starter. I think the longest I’ve ever left mine alone in the fridge was about seven months.) To maintain my starter in the fridge, I do this every two to six months:

Drain off the hooch. (That grey-black stuff in there is basically sourdough poop.)
Throw out all but one cup of the starter. (I try to get some of the clean, bubbly starter from the bottom of the jar.)
Mix one cup of filtered water and one cup of flour into the cup of old starter. Put everything in clean jar,* cover loosely, and put it in the back of the fridge.

*I use antique jars with ill-fitting ceramic-lined lids: they do the job perfectly!

A final note for all you Lifetime Sourdough Bakers out there who tend your starter regularly and have likely cringed your way through this entire post: Please be kind in your comments. We all know that this is not the optimal way to take care of sourdough starter, but it works for me, and I know there are plenty of bakers just like me out there.

How to Make Perfectly Poached Eggs

December 2 By Renée ♥ 15 Comments

Knowing how to poach eggs isn’t magic. In fact, it’s astonishingly easy it is to cook a velvety soft, perfectly poached egg – all you need are a few simple tricks.

I never really liked poached eggs as a kid. But then again, I wasn’t really eating real poached eggs. I was eating little rubber egg-shaped patties posing as poached eggs. My poor mom poached our eggs in a little aluminum poaching pan, and (like many cooks of her era) she cooked them until they were “good and done”; more suitable for bouncing than eating.

I knew that poached eggs had to be better than that. However, when I first tried to poach an egg myself, I got some very bad advice: “Create a swirling pool of boiling water and drop the egg in the middle.” Unfortunately, in the absence of better counsel, I clung to that “expert” advice for over a decade, so it has only been in the last few years that I have discovered just how astonishingly easy it is to cook a velvety soft, perfectly poached egg.

Let me save you some time.

When you poach an egg, you are essentially adding a liquid to a liquid and hoping that one of the liquids sets up before it mixes with the other. When done incorrectly, you can end up with a pot full of “egg-feathers” and foam instead of an egg yolk surrounded by white. There are a number of things you can do to reduce this feathering.

Eggs: Use the freshest eggs you can find. As eggs age, the white breaks down and becomes more watery, so the fresher the egg, the more viscous the white.

Simmer, don’t boil: You want the water to be hot enough to immediately begin to cook the egg when it submerges, but you don’t want the water to move the egg around in the pan. In fact, you don’t want anything to move the egg in the pan, especially for the first minute. That’s means no shaking, no stirring, and for Pete’s sake, no swirling!

Use a sieve: For about a dollar-fifty, you can buy what I consider the Key to Perfectly Poached eggs. A small kitchen sieve allows you to strain off any watery white from the egg, and also gives you the perfect vessel from which to gently roll the egg into the water.

Add vinegar: This is science in action! Vinegar helps the proteins (albumin) to denature (unwind) more quickly and link up to form a network of proteins, thus setting the egg. The quicker the proteins denature the less feathering there will be. (Want to learn more? Check here.) Just do it – it works.

How to Perfectly Poach an Egg

Fill a pot or deep skillet with 2 inches deep with water. Add 1 tablespoon of vinegar to the water. Bring to a rolling boil and then reduce heat so that the water is just barely simmering. There should still be bubbles on the bottom of the pan, but the surface of the water should look calm.
Crack egg into small sieve and allow watery albumin to drain off. Don’t worry; the white and yolk will stay intact inside the sieve.
Holding the egg in the sieve just above the water, gently roll the egg out of the sieve and into the water.
Leave the egg alone. You can put about four or five eggs into the pan at the same time, but be sure they all have enough room. After about a minute, use a slotted spoon to unstick the egg from the bottom of the pan. Allow it to cook a minute or two, and then use the slotted spoon to lift it up out of the water and gently poke it with your finger to see if it is done to your liking. If it is, remove it to a plate. If it needs to cook longer, simply lower it back into the water for another minute and check it again.

That’s it. It seems like it should be more complicated, but it isn’t. Try it a couple of times and you too will be poaching like a pro.

What’s your favorite way to use a poached egg? Let us know in the comments!

How to Dice a Mango

May 9 By Renée ♥ 9 Comments

Mango Magic!

Mangos are tricky, but once you learn their secret, they are easy as pie. (I never really got that idiom, because making a good pie takes a lot of work, but you get the gist.)
The secret is to dice them while the skin is still intact.

First, you need a ripe mango. (Duh.) Ripe mangoes smell sweet and give just a little when you press them with your thumb. Aim for a “semi-firm, ripe peach” feel. Like peaches, overly ripe mangoes are difficult to dice and taste “mushy.” No one wants that.

Once you have your mango, dicing it as easy as 1-2-3!

One: Mangos have a large, flat seed that runs down the center of the fruit. The flesh is firmly attached to it, and it must be cut away, so the first thing you need to do is identify where the seed is. The easiest way to do this is set the mango on the counter. It will naturally settle on it’s side. The seed inside will be parallel to the counter.

To cut the flesh away from the seed, balance the mango on one of the thin sides and cut away the fruit from both sides of the seed. Try to get as close to the seed as possible – you will know you are there when your knife meets with resistance.

Two: Carefully score the mango with a paring knife. You determine the size of your finished diced mango by how close you make the scoring lines. If you do this in your palm, consider putting something between yourself and the mango to prevent injuries. Personally, I score mangoes on the counter – no worries there.

Three: Here’s the Magic! Place your thumbs gently on the face of the scored mango and your fingers underneath. Apply a little counter-pressure and Ta-DA! It pops inside out like magic! Cool, huh?

At this point, you can go a couple of ways:

Eat it now: Just eat the little dices right off the skin. Easy-peasy. No muss, no fuss.
Use it in a recipe or serve it in polite company: Hold the mango over a bowl or plate and, using a sharp paring knife, cut the mango away from the skin.

Eat it later: Wait until your are ready to eat it before you pop it inside-out. I usually skin the flesh around the seed and then sandwich everything back together like this ↓ so I can pack it in my lunch. If you do this, be sure to pack an extra napkin for cleaning up after!

OK, I couldn’t help myself – I just had to show you this little hedgehog that was living inside my mango. (The answer to your question is “whole allspice.”)

Now that you know how to dice a mango the easy way, why not try out your new skills by making the delicious Caribbean Mango Salad?

What is your favorite way to enjoy a mango?

How to Caramelize Onions in a Slow Cooker

November 19 By Renée ♥ Leave a Comment

Caramelized onions are a staple in my kitchen, but it takes so flipping long to do them right! Recently, I spent some time looking up other methods for caramelizing onions and found many people have had good success doing them in a slow cooker, so I decided to try out the process myself. What I found was that, like most instructions for caramelizing onions, time estimates vary dramatically from kitchen to kitchen. (Note: If you ever read a recipe that say you can “caramelize” the onions in 15 minutes, don’t believe it for a second! You can “brown” onions in that time, but it isn’t the same thing. True caramelizing takes time – usually at least an hour on the stove-top.) The majority of slow-cooker caramelizing directions that I found suggested that my crock-pot full of onions would be ready in 10-14 hours – mine took 24 hours, beginning to end. I’m sure that this depends on the size, make and model of your slow cooker, and the type of onions you use.

I used sweet onions because that is what I had on hand, but next time I will use plain yellow field onions, which is what I usually use when I am caramelizing onions on the stove-top. Yellow onions ultimately caramelize better for a couple of reasons: they are lower in water content, which will significantly speed up the process. This excess water is probably what accounts for the additional time it took for my onions to caramelize in the slow cooker this time. Second, while we perceive sweet onions to be sweeter, this has more to do with the fact that yellow onions have more of those pungent lachymators (i.e., stuff that makes you cry) than sweet onions, giving us the impression that they are significantly less sweet. The truth is that yellow onions actually have a far more complex flavor profile, and yield more flavorful caramelized onions.

All that being said, the sweet onions did turn out just great – they just took a heap more time. The process couldn’t be easier though:

First, cut up your onions, from root to stem. America’s Test Kitchen did exhaustive tests on caramelizing onions, and found that they turn out better if you cut them this way.

Fill your slow cooker about 2/3 full of cut onions. Drizzle on a little olive oil and toss them a bit.

Cover and put on low. Stir once every couple hours.

When they are the color and consistency you want, you can remove the lid and let them dry out a bit. This may take 2-5 hours, depending on how much water they have left in them.

How to Grow Rosemary

September 20 By Renée ♥ 7 Comments

A Guide for the Horticulturally Challenged

Fresh rosemary. Nothing quite like it. Beautiful, organic and free – I think everyone with a kitchen knife and a slow cooker should have a rosemary plant of their own.

Mr. B takes care of our yard. He mows and weeds, fertilizes and gardens. Sometimes I help, but I’m careful to let him take charge because it is a well-documented fact that, if my thumb were a Crayola crayon, it would be a shade somewhere between Eggplant and Licorice: Plants in my care must fall into the little-to-no maintenance category if they are to have any hope for survival. Which is why I am so successful growing Rosemary.

How to Grow Rosemary - For the Horticulturally Challenged

Rosemary – perfect herb for the Horticulturally Challenged

My current rosemary plant was a wedding gift to Mr. B and me from my kids’ Gramma Edith. Edith, who is their father’s mom, is a woman with thumbs so green she could make a Popsicle stick bloom. When it comes to gardening, she is always very helpful and encouraging – always trying hard to give me opportunities to succeed. Over the years, however, she has come to understand and accept just how severely Horticulturally Challenged I am. Nevertheless, it is through her positive, encouraging example that I have learned I am very good at raising a few specific plants: African Violets, for one, which people tend to kill by over-watering. And Jade. Ditto. (Over-watering is just not a problem for me.) And Rosemary, which is apparently the Wile E. Coyote of the herb world: you can literally throw it off a cliff onto a pile of Acme dynamite and it will still keep on growing. Here’s what Wikihow says about Rosemary:

Rosemary will adapt to most growing conditions and is quite hardy. It’s happy with snow, limestone, high temperatures, by the seaside, and all sorts of soils. It will grow its best however, in a warm to hot, fairly dry climate.

“Warm to hot, fairly dry climate...” Apparently that’s why it grows so freaking well here in the temperate rain forest that is the PNW. Which is to say, Rosemary is my kind of plant – it doesn’t get hung up on the rules and it’s almost unstoppable. And if I can grow it, so can you. Here’s my easy three-step guide for Rosemary cultivation:

Find a good, hearty Rosemary plant. You can buy one, or ask someone who has one if you can have a clipping from theirs.
Plant it in the ground (or in a pot) and water it a little.
Leave it alone. Except when you need some rosemary, in which case just go out with your kitchen shears and cut some off. Then leave it alone.
If the weather is unseasonably dry, give it a good soaking once a week.
Try to avoid moving your rosemary plant once it has taken root.

Keep in mind that I live in the Pacific Northwest. If you live somewhere else, here are a few more thorough sources you may want to consult:

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How to Roast Garlic

September 3 By Renée ♥ Leave a Comment

Roasted garlic is so simple to make. It’s wonderful in sauces, casseroles, vegetable dishes, or by itself spread on a good piece of bread. Tomorrow’s post will include a garlic sauce that includes it, so I thought I’d better include a quick “How to Roast Garlic” post today!

Preheat oven to 450º. You will need a head of garlic, a pinch of coarse salt, about a teaspoon of olive oil, and a large square of aluminum foil.

Cut the top of of the garlic head to expose the tops of the cloves.

Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt.

Pull the corners of the foil up and twist. Put the wrapped head of garlic in the oven. You can put it in a muffin tin to keep it upright. Bake for 45-60 minutes, or until the cloves feel soft and the top looks caramely.

Garlic will be *very* hot when it comes out of the oven. Wait for it to cool, and then remove cloves individually, or just squeeze it all out at once.

How to Roast Eggplant

August 5 By Renée ♥ 2 Comments

Preparing eggplant often involves frying and a lot of vegetable oil. Roast eggplant is a great tasting, healthy alternative, and is very easy to do.

To roast a whole eggplant, wipe the eggplant clean and slice them in half lengthwise. With the tip of a knife, score the flesh deeply in a diamond cross-hatch pattern by making two or three long cuts, cutting at a steep angle, and then rotating the eggplant to make another set of similar cuts. Press on the edges of the halves to open the cuts and sprinkle salt (1 to 1-1/2 tsp. total for all the halves) over the surface and into the cuts. Set aside, cut side up, for 30 min.

Over the sink, rinse and gently squeeze the eggplant to extract the salty juice, and then wipe them dry with a paper towel. Brush each half thoroughly with olive oil (about 1-2 tsp. per half, depending on size) and season lightly with salt and pepper. Arrange each half, cut side down, on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Roast for about one hour at 400°F. The eggplant will collapse and the bottoms will be a very deep caramel color. Let cool considerably before handling, at least 20 min. Gently turn the cut side up, and with a spoon separate the flesh from the skin. Roast eggplant can be eaten as is or used in a variety of recipes.

This content was originally published on my personal blog, Sock Monkey in 2011.

How to Make a Spice Bag

November 14 By Renée ♥ Leave a Comment