Recipe: Fragrant fruit melds well with peppers, cilantro
(Photos: Kathy Morrison) |
My garden this year blessed me with so many wonderful melons. Specifically large, fragrant Ambrosias -- the best muskmelon I've ever tasted -- and cute little Aspires, a sweet personal-size French Charentais-type melon.
(Gardening note: I highly recommend poultry manure as a overwintering mulch that can be worked into the soil in spring. My melons this year grew where my tomatoes were last year, and they've been healthy and productive all summer.)
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But this melon bounty has its stressful side: what to do with it all? I've given away several melons, and eaten melon for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And I still have more, threatening to rot before my eyes if I don't do something with them quickly,
Last week I had just finished canning nine pints of tomato salsa -- yes, during a heat wave -- and contemplated the fate of the leftover cilantro and peppers. Ah, the melon, of course! Melon salsa, which is uncooked, would be a refreshing change from all that heated stuff but still be flavorful.
We enjoyed the result at dinner, as a condiment with grilled fish, but the salsa would be perfect with grilled chicken, too. Or in a fish taco. Or alongside tortilla chips. (Blue chips make a nice color contrast.) Or anything else that benefits from melon's cool sweetness.
Use whatever chile peppers you like. I'd put all my green jalapeños into the earlier salsa, so I grabbed three small peppers from the garden: a small yellow jalapeño and two shishitos, then tossed in a bit of minced Anaheim pepper to round out the flavors.
Melon salsa
Make about 2-1/2 cups
Ingredients:
1 medium ripe muskmelon or honeydew melon, peeled, seeded and diced (generous 2 cups)
1/4 cup diced red onion
1/4 cup minced cilantro
2 tablespoons (or more, to taste) minced chile pepper, such as jalapeño, serrano, Anaheim, or a mix
2 tablespoons (or more) fresh lime juice
Sea salt, to taste
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Instructions:
Place all the prepared vegetables in a medium bowl. Stir in the lime juice. Add 1/4 teaspoon salt and gently stir. Taste and adjust the seasonings and/or add more lime juice.
Best the day it is made. Serve immediately or cover and refrigerate until serving time. It will keep in the refrigerator, covered, for a day or two but flavors will not be as pronounced.
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Garden Checklist for week of May 12
Get your gardening chores and irrigation done early in the day before temperatures rise.
* Plant, plant, plant! It’s prime planting season in the Sacramento area. Time to set out those tomato transplants along with peppers and eggplants. Pinch off any flowers on new transplants to make them concentrate on establishing roots instead of setting premature fruit.
* Direct-seed melons, cucumbers, summer squash, corn, radishes, pumpkins and annual herbs such as basil.
* Harvest cabbage, lettuce, peas and green onions. This heat will cause leafy greens and onions to flower; pick them before they bolt.
* In the flower garden, direct-seed sunflowers, cosmos, salvia, zinnias, marigolds, celosia and asters.
* Plant dahlia tubers. Other perennials to set out include verbena, coreopsis, coneflower and astilbe.
* Transplant petunias, marigolds and perennial flowers such as astilbe, columbine, coneflowers, coreopsis, dahlias, rudbeckia and verbena.
* Keep an eye out for slugs, snails, earwigs and aphids that want to dine on tender new growth.
* Feed summer bloomers with a balanced fertilizer.
* For continued bloom, cut off spent flowers on roses as well as other flowering plants.
* Got fruit trees? If you haven't already done so, thin orchard fruit such as apples, peaches, pears, pluots and plums before they grow too heavy, breaking branches or even splitting the tree. Leave the largest fruit on the branch, culling the smaller ones, and allow for 5 to 6 inches (or a hand's worth) between each fruit.
* Thin grape bunches, again leaving about 6 inches between them. For the remaining bunches, prune off the "tail" end, about the bottom third of the bunch, so that the plant's energy is concentrated in the fruit closest to the branch.
* As spring-flowering shrubs finish blooming, give them a little pruning to shape them, removing old and dead wood. Lightly trim azaleas, fuchsias and marguerites for bushier plants.
* Add mulch to the garden to help keep that precious water from evaporating. Mulch also cuts down on weeds. But don’t let it mound around the stems or trunks of trees or shrubs. Leave about a 6-inch to 1-foot circle to avoid crown rot or other problems.
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