Tropical recipes: watermelon and coconut

Water melon pickles, I used this recipe

 Despite the valid exhortations from the great and the good to shop local with fruit and vegetables, I must admit to a recent obsession with the tropics. Take watermelon for instance, they are almost camp as a fruit, the outsize pre-historic green bowling ball with its juicy pink interior, studded with black seeds. No artist can resist painting it. But they are a pain in the bicep to shop for…you need a man to carry them or have them delivered. 
You can make vibrant salads and canapes with watermelon: use slices topped with feta cheese and mint or ceviche-style sea bass or seared tuna with a squeeze of lime. I’ve also made a southern favourite, beloved of Elvis and Dolly: watermelon rind pickles. 
Watermelon are fabulously colourful to use in drinks: my favourite cocktail, a Margarita, only gets better when you include watermelon juice. (Easily made with a Vitamix blender. What’s that? A super fast and powerful blender. It can make ordinary sugar into fresh icing sugar. I was well impressed by that. ) 
Coconuts were used extensively on my Bestival menu. I made a ‘sambal’ (a combination of sauce/chutney) to accompany the South Seas Soup, coconut milk in the soup, and coconut cream in the delicious cocktails served in….coconut drinking shells! Again I used the Vitamix to make the sambal quickly but you could try an ordinary blender, a pestle and mortar or chop by hand.

South Seas soup with coconut sambal

Watermelon Margarita recipe: 

Make sure all the ingredients are cold or use crushed ice.

Salt

Ice (optional)

A thick slice of watermelon, rind off, seeded, cut into chunks.

A shot of tequila

A shot of triple sec or Chase Marmalade vodka

Juice of half a lime

Wet the rim of the glass with a lime and salt it by turning the glass over into a saucer of salt. You can use different coloured salts if you like.

Blend and strain the watermelon into a glass. Add the tequila and Triple Sec. Add the lime. 

Mix.

Garnish with a wedge of watermelon.

Drink. 

Coconut cocktails