Watermelon Granita
Doesn’t this look bad? I mean good because it’s so bad – sugary, creamy, and hip-enlarging?
Gotcha.
It’s so not. Wait a minute. It is good, but it’s not bad. You follow?
What we’ve got here is the result of my panic when X brought home a watermelon (that’s pasteque to you Frenchies), and I was really not in the mood for doing anything much with it — I would have made a watermelon salad with feta, but I didn’t have the Kalamatas that I really love, and didn’t feel like taking the #52 bus down to the Greek restaurant in Passy where I usually buy them.
Sloth and laziness. The mother and child of invention.
So I had watermelon, and some mint, and a blender. A few whirrs later, and I poured this into a container, and shoved it in the freezer. That afternoon, a few scrapes of the dinner fork later, the pink liquid transformed into watermelon granita, an icier, fancier version of its former self.
I spooned it into a fat little glass, as you can see here, but thought that it needed an extra something, and that something needed to be Greek yogurt — in this case, tricked out with a bit of sugar and vanilla.
But not too much. It is still swimsuit season.
It’s also time to celebrate the one year (ish) anniversary of our Twitter #Let’s Lunch bunch, a group that was formed last summer when food blogger Cheryl Tan and I were tweeting back and forth about bacon (I’m still thinking of that latticed bacon that she weaved together for our BLT lunch, our very first date. Lattice bacon? Genius.). We’ve taken a bit of a break – this spring, Cheryl’s been busy putting the finishing touches on her upcoming memoir, “A Tiger in the Kitchen,” and I’ve been working on my first cookbook — but now, smack dab in the middle of summer, we’re meeting again for a virtual lunch(just go to Twitter and type in the hashtag, #letslunch, to follow the stream or click over to the blogs below to see the other recipes). Because it’s still boiling hot in most places, we figured a cool dessert would be just the thing to reconnect.
Welcome back, everyone!
Check out the rest of the recipes:
ShowFood Chef: Melon Fresca with Blackberry Granita
Steff Childs/The Kitchen Trials: Fudgie No-Bake Cookies
A Tiger in the Kitchen: Lemongrass Frozen Yogurt
GeoFooding: Black Sesame Ice Cream
Bon Vivant: Summer Berry Granita with Roasted White Peaches
Watermelon Granita
½ small seedless watermelon
pinch sea salt
8 leaves mint
300 grams/10 oz/1 1/4 cup Greek yogurt
4 teaspoons sugar (or more or less, to your taste)
½ teaspoon vanilla
1. Cut the watermelon into 4 x 4 inch chunks, and put in the blender along with the pinch of salt and mint. Puree until smooth, and pour in a shallow plastic container and slide into the freezer. Every 30 minutes or so, take a fork and scrape the top. After 3-4 hours, you’ll have granita.
2. In a medium bowl, whisk together the yogurt, sugar and vanilla.
When ready to assemble, just layer the granita/yogurt mixture– like lasagne, but you know, not.
