Roasted melon seeds

Winter squash are not the only gourds that have edible seeds. Many melons have them, too. You roast or pan fry these seeds and crack them open like sunflower seeds. In Egypt, watermelon seeds are a traditional snack food, actually!

So if you wish to try this snack out for yourself, here's how you do it.



Roasted watermelon seeds:
1. Getting the seeds out. You want a watermelon that is NOT seedless for this snack. The white seeds' don't have a kernel that you can consume, really (it's not poisonous; it's just not there). So you want  a melon with big, dark seeds. Here's a lovely instructable about the easiest way to de-seed a watermelon:
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-remove-most-of-the-seeds-when-cutting-up-a-/

2. Next, you want to rinse and dry the seeds. Or just dry them, if you want a bit of the melon taste remaining - it's not bad, really. The seeds will take 1-2 hours to dry, usually.

3. Now, to roast these. If you do this in a pan, you want to put them in a pan either dry or with oil (I've seen recipes for both) and roast until nearly done. Then take a cup of water, mix in some salt, and after mixing it together well, slowly add this to the pan and mix it around as the water boils off. You are left with roasted, salted watermelon seeds. A more detailed recipe for this method can be found here:
http://egyptfarm.blogspot.com/2008/07/eating-watermelon-seeds.html

4. If you wish to roast watermelon seeds in an oven, they do well around 350 F, for 10-15 minutes. For this method, I have salted the seeds with a mixture of salt and water, or used olive oil and salt. I think it did better with the olive oil.

Notes:
1. Cantaloupe and honeydew seeds can also be roasted and eaten, although they are smaller and trickier to crack open to get at the kernel. The smaller size will also require a shorter cooking time and/or lower temperature when roasting in the oven. I have not yet perfected this; all I can say is that 5-10 minutes was what worked for me, but I had to check the seeds constantly - a minute or two too long and they burnt. I haven't tried the pan frying method for these, but I imagine it would work just fine.

2. LOW HISTAMINE DIET - This seems to be low histamine diet compliant according to most sources.