Summer’s Last Gasp: Spilled Milk #134

Here's my watermelon salad recipe: It's sweet and spicy. It's sour and saucy. You'll want to eat it all year long.

Everyone does it with tomatoes. Some with corn. But what about MELONS! Especially watermelon — why oh why? I have a lot to say on this subject.

1. End-of-summer food columns are overwhelmingly all about tomatoes, from making sauce to drying them in various stages to making pies and tomato waters or vinegars. I am a fan, but enough is enough.

2. Corn is superb, and I process a lot of it to make pints of purée for use later in the winter for succotash, pasta and risotto dishes especially.

3. BUT here is the kicker, because of some smart farmers in warm-weather spots around the lower 48, good heirloom tomatoes and pretty decent corn are available more months outside of the northern summertime than ever before.

4. What ISN’T available outside of northern summertime is a decent melon. And it kills me, because I am melon-obsessed. Now, I am not including $400-apiece Japanese exotics, and I also try to eat seasonally, so in the wintertime I am focused on citrus, tropicals, etc. And while mangoes and papayas are a decent sub in many dishes for melons, I miss melon salads.

5. Over the years melon-based salads are my jam. It started with a fried chicken salad on watermelon and morphed from there. It’s the salad that launched a thousand ships at my house: Cantaloupe and cold sliced roasted duck salads with mustard-honey vinaigrette, Korean melons with gochujang and daikon salads, Chinese chicken salad with sesame peanut dressing on julienne crisp honeydew .… BUT my favorites are watermelon/feta salads. So I took the fried-chicken-salad dressing idea (a modified nuoc cham) and applied it to the watermelon/feta salad, but it needed more to distract the feta away, so I worked on it a bit and that’s the video you are looking at.