Sweet Melon
The red deserts of Eastern Umbigal are a very arid environment, and as such fresh drinking water is an important consideration for day to day life. Watermelons serve as a semi-major crop in the region, being used to retain and preserve moisture from brief windows of heavy rainfall. They also play a role in many traditional dishes from the region, including the dessert sweet melon.
I am not going to pretend like this turned out exactly as I was hoping it would. I am not a chef, or even decent at cooking; I did not know that you couldn’t really mash watermelon. I did not know that honey was denser than a cream/watermelon concoction. And I did not know that the bottom of a watermelon is not 100% waterproof.
Despite the shortcomings of my efforts, I enjoyed the process, and it did taste good. More importantly though, it made me feel closer to the world I’ve created, and if you’re feeling adventurous, you can try to make it using the recipe below. Who knows, you might even actually know how to cook, and improve on it. If you do, I’d be happy to hear about your efforts on whichever post originally linked you to this page, most likely at one of the sites below:
Ingredients
- 1 small watermelon
- 1 1/2 cups of heavy whipping cream
- 5 Tbsp of Agave (may be substituted for honey or sugar)
- Honey
Tools: Large knife, cutting board, mashing tool or blender, spoon or ice cream scoop, large mixing bowl, whisk, smaller bowls.
Recipe
Step 1:
Take your melon and cut it down the middle.
Step 2:
Scoop out the red flesh of the watermelon. I personally used a tiny ice-cream scoop to do this. The texture will be better the more of it you can get out.
Step 3:
Smash or blend the chunks you’ve carved out into a soup. Here is the first place where things did not go entirely as planned, since it turns out that watermelon flesh, shockingly, is primarily water, and does not produce the paste I was hoping it would.
Step 4:
Add the 1 1/2 cups of cream gradually, whipping it as you do so.
Step 5:
Add the agave and whisk it into the mix. Honey or sugar can be substituted as the sweetener, but I was advised that honey would be more difficult to mix in, and sugar is not easily sourced in the red deserts of Eastern Umbigal.
I used 5 Tbsp of agave, but more or less sweetener may be used to your personal taste.
Step 6:
Ladel out the mix from the bowl back into the watermelon rinds. You will have a fair amount left over, because as it turns out, when you add 1 1/2 cups of heavy whipping cream to a preexisting volume, it will no longer fit in its original container.
Placing the two rind halves into small bowls may be helpful for preventing a mess.
Step 7:
Sweet melon is traditionally served chilled. Since I do not have an underground ice pit, I left the sweet melon in a freezer for about 3 hours. Leave longer if you prefer a more frozen final project.
Step 8:
Remove the rinds from the freezer, and quickly drizzle honey on top. Serve quickly, as the honey will sink rapidly depending on how frozen the dessert is.
And you are finished! Thank you for reading this, and if you tried the recipe yourself, I hope you had fun making it, and that it turned out decent. If you didn’t try it, I hope the insight into the process was entertaining regardless. It would be fun to try again, but that is for another time, and hopefully with someone more experienced helping me along.
Uruda was a city unlike any other in the Empire; Nowhere else had its ruling philosophy failed so spectacularly.