I have recently found a store that sells watermelons for quite a good price. It is a little bit of a bike ride to get to the store, but once you are there you will notice why I would bike all the way to the other side of the city just for watermelons. When I visited the place it immediately called for my attention because they sell different variations of watermelon. They sell the tiny ones, that you can find in many supermarkets in the Netherlands and Denmark, but they have added middle sized watermelons and giant size watermelons to their display as well. When I say giant sized I mean giant as in watermelons you can live in! Watermelons that can replace cars! And watermelons the size of small planets. Of course I am over exaggerating but the watermelons I saw definitely reached my knee and I am (as most Dutch people are) a little tall.
As you might have read in the beginning of the story, I biked there so there was absolutely no way I could have left that store with more than one giant-knee-reaching-watermelon on my tiny racing bike. Which was a good thing, because one of these bad boys is enough to keep two people fed on watermelon for a few days. Because we have been eating watermelon a lot I have noticed that the texture and flavour fits quite good with savoury dishes as well since it is not too sweet. You might have also heard that watermelon combined with sea salt taste pretty delicious and you can actually bbq slices of watermelon and call it steak (veggie hack!).
Since we had plenty of watermelon, we started to cook with it even more, and created a Hawaiian poke bowl inspired dish. But instead of salmon we used watermelon. Ever since one of our friends went to Hawaii (without us!), we have been loving the pictures and food stories she shared, and one of the best dishes she told us about was the poke bowl; we love bowls, we love salad, only one problem… we do not love fish (fish are friends, not food). So a watermelon ‘salmon’ meant that we could finally enjoy a poke bowl as well. For this recipe we created some spring roll crisps as a topping for the poke bowl. You could decide to leave them out, but their crunch is a nice addition of texture that you otherwise might miss.
Dressing
3 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp watermelon juice
2 tbsp rice vinegar
1 garlic clove (finely minced)
1 tsp grounded ginger
Juice of 1 lime
1 tbsp sesame seeds
Add all ingredients together and mix well.
Crisps
4 spring roll sheets (sliced in strips)
Coconut oil
Heat up a small amount of coconut oil in a pan and add a few of the spring roll strips. Bake them until golden, take them out and start with a new batch.
Poke Bowls
half a medium watermelon (in cubes)
2 cups of rice (cooked or steamed)
1 mango (in cubes)
1 cucumber (sliced)
2 carrots (sliced)
½ cup green peas
2 bell peppers (sliced)
½ cabbage (sliced)
1 sheet of seaweed (finely cut into small pieces)
handful of koriander
Add rice to a bowl, top with the watermelon, mango, cucumber, carrots, peas, bell peppers and the cabbage. Then add the dressing and the spring roll crisps. Top with the finely chopped seaweed and koriander.
#watermelon #pokebowl #inspireddish #salad #summer #fruit #savouryfruit