Cantaloupe smoothie - dairy free

OMG - I loved this so much!

Dairy free Cantaloupe smoothie

Can't even express the love for this

Ingredients:
2 -3 cups cubed cantaloupe, frozen (enough to fill on sandwich sized ziploc bag, with cubes about 1 1/2 - 2 inches wide. I used very ripe cantaloupe.)
Juice from 1-2 med. lemon
1-2 Tb. honey (optional- I honestly don't typically use it)
enough water to grant right consistency, if needed.

What you do.
1. Put the frozen cantaloupe into a blender.
2. Add in the lemon juice.
3. Put the honey in a mug with about 1/2 cup of water or so and microwave until hot.
4. Pour honey-water mixture over frozen cantaloupe.
5. Blend on ice crusher setting at first, then whatever setting blends to your desired consistency. Add water at any point the mixture becomes too thick.

Variations:
1. Using fresh instead of frozen cantaloupe, blend up all ingredients. Put in a ziploc bag in the freezer and freeze. Either take out when half frozen, in 1-2 hours, and use as a slushie, or take out later when frozen and thaw partially before eating.

2. If you don't have anything frozen yet, use fresh cantaloupe, blend it a little, and then simply add some ice and keep blending.

3. FOR EXTRA PROTEIN (fresh version) - in variation #2, when getting the fresh cantaloupe, don't discard the seeds. Blend them up with the fresh melon for twice as long, until a relatively smooth liquid, and THEN add the lemon juice and ice and blend.  The icy texture hides any residual seed texture, and the seeds are edible, just like pumpkin seeds, so you get a bit of extra protein. 

4. FOR EXTRA PROTEIN (frozen version) - If you want to do frozen melon cubes, when you are cutting up the cubes in order to freeze them, set a few aside with the seeds. Take the set aside cubes and blend them up with the seeds until it's juice, and then freeze those in ice cube trays. Add 1-2 cubes of 'seed+juice' to each bag of frozen melon cubes so they all get a bit more protein.

Notes:
1. After making this for a while now, I don't add honey any longer. a really ripe melon will make it quite sweet enough, in my experience.

2. This was REALLY nice. I don't tend to like melon all that much, especially cantaloupe - it has a musky quality that I don't find pleasant. However, the lemon in this cut that quality significantly and the honey counteracted the sour taste. You're left with an almost floral, tangy but sweet smoothie that was actually addicting, which I never thought I'd say about melon!

3. LOW HISTAMINE  - On some lists, this is low in histamines already. In other lists, it's low histamine if you drop the lemon but keep the honey, as long as the honey is pasteurized. Based on yet other low-histamine diet lists, only the cantaloupe is safe. If the latter is what you have to eat, I'd use cantaloupe and perhaps make some apple concentrate yourself and add that as the sweetener, if needed. A little water by itself could work in a pinch.