How to puree an entire watermelon

The first time I pureed an entire watermelon, it was in the course of making Smitten Kitchen's watermelon lemonade (which was almost as fantastic as Deb's pictures look).  For our housecooling party, we decided to make aguas frescas, so it seemed like another pureed watermelon was in order.

Now, that first pureed watermelon was definitely harder than I expected.  The chief difficulty is that we don't have a blender, only a cuisinart food processor.  Food processors can do almost anything blenders can, except deal neatly with large quantities of liquid.  Well let me tell you:  a pureed watermelon is a large quantity of liquid.

This time around, I had a flash of insight-- the immersion blender we had just gotten as a wedding present!  No problem.  The only hard thing I foresaw was cutting all that melon off the rind.  [That problem, it turned out was easily solved-- just cut the melon in thick, round slices with a big chef's knife, and then cut the rind away from the outside.]

However, I had accidentally bought a melon that was not seedless.  This required a colander and a lot of paper towels.  [See right.]  We left a bunch of the watermelon to strain and went off to see a movie, and it worked pretty well.  I squeezed a bunch of the pulp through the paper towels at the end to make sure we weren't missing too much of the good stuff.

So, learn from my many mistakes!

How to puree an entire watermelon:

1. Buy a seedless watermelon.
   
2. Cut it into slices with a big knife.
3. Cut the rind off of each slice and throw it away.
4. Roughly chop the watermelon flesh and put it in a big bowl.
5. Attack it mercilessly with an immersion blender.
6. Strain it only if you are the kind of killjoy who won't accept pulp in your orange juice.
7. Enjoy!