Watermelon- Mint Salad

This turned out amazing - a nice, cool treat for summertime, and super easy. Pictures will come, as usual, when the camera is behaving.

Watermelon-Mint Salad



Ingredients:
Ripe watermelon, cubed
fresh mint leaves
a freshly juiced lime
If you can have dairy: chèvre, or feta cheese (or a sour goat cheese of some kind)
If you can't have dairy: I'll have a dairy free alternatives listed below the recipe.

Directions:
1. Put the watermelon in a bowl. Wash mint leaves, pull off stem, and tear into pieces - I tore large mint leaves into about 6-8 pieces each. Add to bowl and mix.

2. Juice the lime and drizzle a little bit of lime juice over the watermelon. Add crumbled feta cheese or chèvre broken into small pieces, or the dairy-free alternative mentioned below. Mix and serve and it's awesome. The mint makes the whole dish seem cooler in your mouth, and the sour of the cheese really blends nicely with the sweet watermelon.

In Addition:
1. For the ingredient amounts, basically, you want a cube of watermelon, a piece of mint, and a piece of cheese on every forkful to get a good flavor.  Usually, I keep the lime juice very low - I just used 3-5 drops per soup bowl sized serving, essentially.

2. The sweeter the melon, the more you want of the sour cheese, so you may end up with more or less depending on that.


Dairy Free Version:
To make this dish dairy free, you need something sour, for the missing cheese. Lemon juice would definitely work (I would still keep the lime juice, too, even with added lemon), or possibly a liquid mixed with amchur powder, or maybe even sorrel, torn into small pieces, in a pinch.

If you can have nuts and you want to recreate the creamy, aspect, too - and that was nice in the recipes, but not essential - you could make a little cashew cream, maybe thin it out a bit, and mix it with something sour like lemon juice and maybe use it as a dressing over the watermelon, lime juice, and mint. If you don't like it chunky, I'd strain the cashew cream. Or if you want it more like the original, you could thicken the cashew cream and lemon juice in a sauce pan,let it cool, and then break it into little balls/pieces and add it that way.

You could possibly use coconut milk/cream, instead, but I think that would be something to do for a completely different type of dish (I've seen smoothies made from mint, lime juice, watermelon, and coconut water, for example). I think it would still taste pretty good, and I might alter the amount of the lime juice, but it could work. Hmm...maybe you could even freeze it for a sort of ice cream, yum.


I would definitely make this again - my daughter loved it, and ate hers in seconds on a day when many other foods were making her feel nauseated, so I'd call this recipe a total win!

Inspired by:
I got the idea for this from some random TV show I saw years ago on some food channel - I caught it playing on a TV out at a restaurant waiting room, as I recall. I only remember there was a salad and it had mint, watermelon, and some kind of cheese in it. As we had all of these, and have been exploring a little dairy now, the result is this. So thankful I saw that show and it popped into mind, after all this time!