What is the plural of daiquiri?

For our Blue Crush party, the house drink was the frozen daiquiri, adapted very loosely from Mark Bittman, but with less rum (to accommodate our guests who had to work the next day), and frozen limeade from concentrate substituting for fresh-squeezed lime juice and sugar.  We made pretty good work of a full pitcher.

Ingredients:

4 cups frozen strawberries
1 12 oz. container frozen limeade from concentrate
1 cup rum (Bacardi dark rum works well, but it probably doesn't matter)

Recipe:

Place ingredients in cuisinart or blender.  Puree.  Pour (carefully) into pitcher.  Drink.  Little paper umbrellas optional.

Granola, Revisited

I went on a serious granola-making kick for a while in law school, although I haven't done so nearly as much since discovering a few brands of storebought Granola that are only moderately oversweet, nor since acquiring a granola-making mother-in-law.  When I did make granola, I had a recipe I was fairly happy with, except that the granola never really got clumpy, and I didn't want to have to add lots of oil and sweeteners to make it clump. 
According to David Lebovitz, the missing secret ingredient was . . . applesauce!  I will just have to try this.

Simple Question

Q:  What kind of apple is best?

Nectarine pie

Before I left town for the weekend I decided to leave my wife with a homemade pie.  I started working off of this SmittenKitchen recipe for peach creme fraiche pie, slowly acquiring the ingredients and secreting them in the kitchen so as not to spoil the surprise.  Oh, I used nectarines instead of peaches, because they looked marginally less despondent at the grocery store.  And our oven is on the cold side, so it took forever to bake.  And please remember that other than the cherry slab pie pictured in the banner right now, I'm pretty sure this is the first pie I've ever baked.  But it wasn't so bad, really.  I might conquer this fear of baking yet!

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!

A tale of two fruit salads

Once upon a time, when serving fruit salad for a large brunch party, we used to make two-- both with the fruit lightly macerated and dressed in lemon juice, and one with the addition of mint. [N.B. The best way to add mint to a fruit salad is to treat it as a giant mojito. Julienne/dice a large amount of mint, then toss it with sugar. Then muddle (i.e., smash) the sugar against the side of the bowl until the oil in the mint leaves starts to make a paste with the sugar. This is easier than you think! Then add lemon juice. Amounts to taste, but 1/2 a cup fo sugar and the juice of 2 lemons was pretty good for half a watermelon, a canteloupe, and a quart of strawberries.] We figured that some people wouldn't want such a fancy addition to a simple fruit salad and would prefer the simpler version.

Every single time, we ran out of mint fruit salad long before the plain one. We learned from experience, and feel unabashed about adding mint now.

Recently, I've begun to think about adding crumbled or diced feta cheese to our basic mint fruit salad. "And yet," I thought to myself, "some of our guests are vegan, or don't like briny cheese. So we should make two. . . ." [I haven't tried it yet.]