Do you never get tired of playing with your food? It's beautiful. I understand that.

I am always thankful I look at your pictures after I have eaten.
Thank you for always brightening my life with your beautiful food pictures.

My Grandma used to make watermelon chips- yum! I really love these pics and look forward to hearing some details, mainly about the last dish. Looks wonderfully savory.

Last year I made salted watermelon jelly. It was a big seller. I've made pickled rind which has absolutely no nutritional value but well loved old fashioned and memory inducing. Had not thought about sauteing the fruit, sounds good. My melons are just now getting big enough to harvest.

Nancy

I swear, every time you post new pictures,
You out-do yourself!

These have GOT to be some of the prettiest yet!

AND! !
They look so appetizing!
I didn't think anything would stimulate my appetite
In this heat.
But these pictures do ! ! ! !

Rusty

Ditto what everyone else said.

Watermelon seeds?? All the stores here stock only the round, mostly tasteless, seedless watermelons. I crave the dark, sweet juicy melons with the big black seeds. THAT is a watermelon.

The Mennonites do grow and sell them.

I agree! I hadn't had a "real" watermelon in years and was starting to think I'd just lost taste for them. Then I tried one with black seeds and realized what I'd been missing. The worst are the mini watermelons, IMO.

Such pretty pictures! What we don't eat goes into the compost pile. The worms like watermelon too. (I cut the rind up into small easy to eat pieces for them.)
Clare

Oh, watermelon and cantaloupe is a real treat for the worms!!! It's a real feeding frenzy when they get that.

Jasdip, you mentioned watermelons that the Mennonites
grow. Well, let me tell you my story. I stopped at
a roadside stand, that was run by the Mennonites, and
bought a round melon. It was the roundest melon I had
ever seen. I took it home and put it in the fridge to
cool, but when I cut it open, a while later, there
were 7,891 seeds PER BITE, (yup, I counted 'em).
And they were the black seeds, but the melons were
very tasty, once you got by the seeds, (PTOOEY).

Ohhhh, lbpod! That's awful. I like melons with the black seeds, but that's a little overkill. Betcha love buying seedless after that experience!

So beautiful it lifts my spirits. Big smile on my formerly crabby face. Thanks again.

I 'may have' exagerated the number of seeds per bite,
(by one or two), but the purpose of my posting was
to let others know that just because a mellon is round,
does not mean that it is seedless.

Thank you everyone. Thank you all for your encouragements. You are too kind.

Watermelon with seeds brings fond memories. When I was a kid, a bunch of us naughty boys would go around steeling watermelons. We dumped the stolen watermelons in a deep well to keep them cooled. We would enjoy the watermelons and organize the boys and girls in the area to have watermelon seed spitting contests.

Jenny, the pasta with clam sauce dish:

Clams were sous vide cooked at low temperature to make them very tender. Haft of the clam juice is used with home-made pancetta to make the sauce for the pasta, and the other half of the juice is used to Sautee the watermelon.

dcarch

I prefer watermelon with seeds. I think the seedless watermelons have far less flavor.

Beautiful pictures, dcarch!

"...clam juice is used with home-made pancetta to make the sauce for the pasta..."

It's interesting to know you do that. I add linguica to clam sauce. Similar idea. I chop the clams and linguica to the same size. The flavors are very complimentary.

Jim

Thank you Marilyn. Not only that seeded watermelon tastes better, they are also cheaper.

Jim, pancetta works better than bacon. I only use a little so that the clam taste dominate. Yes, aged pork seems to pair well with clams

dcarch

"I only use a little so that the clam taste dominate."

Yes, I do the same with linguica -- just a little.

"...pancetta works better than bacon."

The old, traditional recipes for New England clam chowder always called for salt pork., but most recipes now call for bacon. I don't care for bacon because its flavor is too prominent in the chowder. And I rarely have salt pork on hand, so I use butter. Two days ago I made my best chowder ever!

"Yes, aged pork seems to pair well with clams."

Good point. I also add a little linguica (which provides spice as well as pork flavor) to stuffed quahogs.

Sorry for wandering so far from the OT. This is very interesting to me and I've never seen it discussed before.

Jim

The clams were made using sous vide low temperature. They were very tender. However the adductor muscles were very tough. I removed them and grind them up in a coffee grinder and used that for the sauce as well.

dcarch