Happy Watermelon Day! 5 recipes to help you actually use a whole melon

So far you’ve spent your summer enjoying everything Brooklyn has to offer, from celebrity-studded comedy shows to trips out to Rockaway; and now, in a haze of summer-inspired spontaneity, you decided that the gorgeous and sweltering sunset demanded fresh watermelon. So you bought a whole damn watermelon. Sure, it looks so delicious in the store, and yes, your biceps do looked jacked from carrying it to your fifth-floor walk-up, but guess what, hotshot? Tomorrow morning you’ll wake up to find a good 3/4 of a watermelon staring you right in the face, daring you to try and phrase this as anything close to a good investment. Well, have no fear Brokelynites, cause I’ve got your back with a bevy of watermelon recipes to show that green bastard what’s what, just in time for National Watermelon Day, which is today!

1. Watermelontini cocktails
Well, first we look to the first rule of cooking, and indeed, the first rule of life: “Shouldn’t you be doing that drunker?” So how about giving your inner mixologist a chance to stretch his suspenders with a cocktail.

For this, you’ll need:

1 oz watermelon puree (go with around 4 ½ oz though if you’d like to make the other recipes)

3 tablespoons cardamom syrup (yeah, yeah, insert handlebar mustache joke here. Go out and get some cardamom wherever you can find it, and throw a good bunch into a batch of half sugar, half water until it smells cardamom-y and cook down halfway.)

10 mint leaves

¼ lime

½ oz vodka

-Throw into a shaker and mix til cold, then drink up.

2. Grilled Watermelon Dipping Sticks with Balsamic Cream and Spicy Asian Salt

For this, get off your lazy ass and get:

Watermelon cut into slices, as many as you want

¾ cup cheap balsamic vinegar

1/3 cup crème fraiche (crreeeemmeeee fraaaiiiiiiche). This can be expensive, so you could theoretically use sour cream instead of creme fraiche, but you’d have to take it down by about a 1/4 , so it’d probably be around 1/4 cup sour cream. Or you could always make your own!

2 teaspoons sugar

2 tbsp sugar

1 tbsp salt

2 fresh thai chilis

-Toss the watermelon slices onto the grill or grill pan set to high heat and wait til you see some serious color on those sons-er-bitches before flipping. Cut into strips.

-in sauce pan, stir vinegar, crème fraiche and sugar until sauce consistencey is reached, about 8 minutes. Or don’t, I’m not the food police.

-In a coffee grinder, blend sugar, salt and chilis until fine.

-start dipping those bad boys, duh.

3.Watermelon Barbecue Sauce

Start this one off by grabbing a big ol’ side of pork ribs — you’ll need something to slather this sauce on.

½ cup watermelon puree

1/3 cup balsamic vinegar

¼ cup brown sugar

¼ cup soy sauce

2 tbsp garlic powder

2 tbsp onion powder

-Start by putting the ribs in a baking dish with about an inch of water, and putting that in the oven at 250. Turn after an hour, and give it another hour on the other side. Combine all the other ingredients for your barbecue sauce, and slather that on your ribs. Crank the heat up to 400, bake for 30 minutes and serve.

4. Watermelon Beet Granita

4 cups watermelon puree

¾ cup roasted beets (roast at 375 in aluminum with oil for approx. 25 mins)

Juice of 2 whole limes

1/3 cup sugar

-Blend watermelon puree, beets, lime juice, and sugar. Pour into baking dish, and freeze. When the top layer of the dish is frozen, go in with a fork and scrape it off, saving it in a different container in the freezer. Continue going back and scraping until all of the mixture is shaved.

5. Bonus Watermelon Gazpacho! For certain vegetarians who won’t be named (Tim Donnelly! Oh, I guess they will be)

3 cups watermelon chopped whatever way you feel like

1 cucumber chopped up

¼ cup almonds

1 red pepper, chopped

1 small onion, chopped

2 tbsp lemon juice

2 tbspn olive oil

3 tbspn sherry vinegar

1 thai chilli

2 tbspn thai basil, or mint if you’re lazy/broke

Salt and pepper to taste

-Blend the whole damn thing, plus whatever else you want to stick in there, and let it mellow out for an hour. Put in your tofu-scarfing vegan face hole. [Ed. note: Yum! -Td.]