Summer is – or should be – the season of sunshine and warm sticky weather. Long evenings spend with friends on a terrace sipping on a cold glass of wine. BBQ’s and the smell of woodfire coming from neighboring gardens. It should be the season where you wear as little clothes as possible and/or decent. The season where you’ve got to worry if your love-handles haven’t taken over your waist or if it is still worth salvaging…The season where the entire country wants to be on the tiny strip of land we call beach, resulting in massive (and I mean massive) traffic jams all the way from everywhere to the coast… The season you lie in bed and every single thread of fibre on your body is too much to handle. The season where you wake up because the light entering the bedroom is too bright to be ignored. That’s what summer should be more or less, right?

But while I am typing this down it is raining cats and dogs outside (always loved that expression!) and the wind is howling around the house. It looks more like autumn then summer although the temperatures in the house are still of summery proportions. We did have quite a few nice and sunny days really, so I am not complaining… Just stating the obvious. You’ve got to know too that I actually love rain… I think there is nothing more soothing then a downpour of some kind. But.. having said that; all in their own time ofcourse. Rain is for autumn and winter and ok, a little in spring. But summer is supposed to be hot and sunny so we can indulge on lovely treats like this raspberry yogurt popsicle. Which is actually very healthy too as it has almost no sugar, lots of healthy yogurt and fruit! The perfect guilt free summer snack.

The recipe comes from Allerhande which is a food magazine here made by one of the supermarkets… They had loads of other popsicle flavors but basically you can add almost anything to it, freeze it and it will come out tasting delicious. I’m planning on making loads more! That is… if the weather gets any better…

It’s no secret; I love ice cream. And ever since I discovered the hidden treasures of homemade icecream I am sold. I even started making my own popsicles this week too! (more on that in a later post)

My ice-cream maker has been doing overtime lately… The only disadvantage being that I need to freeze the container every time in between ice-creams. Making two in a row is not an option. Probably a good thing too or I would be the size of an elephant… Last night we were having my father in law over for dinner and the theme was Asian food. I had on the menu rice paper spring rolls (recipe soon to follow!) with peanut-sauce, coconut shrimps, Thai chicken curry and for dessert the coconut ice-cream. I love my ice-cream to be yoghurt based. Not because of the lower calorie content but simply because I like the taste better. To me it goes perfect with summer. Fresh and slightly acidic. So when I saw the recipe for ice cream yogurt in my Steamy Kitchen cookbook I just knew that would be perfect as dessert for the asian dinner.

What I should have done is make the ice cream in the afternoon and freeze it. Because freshly turned it melts by looking at it. (any ice cream melts when you look at it, duh.. but this one just sooo much faster!) The original recipe called for coconut extract but I could not find that anywhere so I used regular coconutcream but not enough. There was a slight coconut taste but not enough.

Watermelon madness or color madness??

Do you need sunglasses yet? Sorry, I just love this photo and it’s probably wrong for whatever gazillion color reason but I couldn’t resist posting it to make sure you were all wide awake… See the thing with these Plate to Page people is that they are never satisfied… Seriously… I post my watermelon icecream perfectly on time looking slick and shiny and guess what my dear friend Astrid cannot resist mentioning… “Where is the photo of the raw watermelon??” See what I mean? I had forgotten to take a photo of the raw thing… Simply because I was too busy using it in salads and icecream. And technically, if you think about it, in none of these cases was the melon ever cooked, baked, grilled or otherwise prepared, so technically you are looking at a photo of a raw watermelon right now… See it? The one in shocking pink, blue and red? Pretty isn’t it? Ofcourse – as much as I hate to admit it – Astrid was ofcourse right, so just for everyone’s peace of mind; here is the damn raw thing…

A raw watermelon...

It doesn’t look so very different from the one above, but I sort of took the idea of Ilva to make the watermelon into balls. Which incidently I left my melonball-cutter in the studio so I did this with a teaspoon measure. Works fairly ok.

Because Astrid made me take the photo on your left I felt I needed a new bowl to complete the task, so this afternoon after having lunch with my sister in Hilversum I made a little visit to the cookery shop (we don’t have one of that size in Almere, which is probably a good thing) and I ventured upstairs to have a look at the selection, only to be blinded by stunning, stunning plates, bowl, cups etc. They’re made in Portugal and the brandname is Mateus and I sort of fell in love with all of it. The problem is that one small bowl costs the shocking amount of 22 euro. And I bought two; the blue one above and the pink one on the left… That’ll be 50 euro’s please.. I know it’s ridiculous but I have only or mostly white bowls and that gets boring after a while. I have also decided I want to have the entire series for my regular plates. I’ll just buy a few each month… *deep sigh*… On the bright side; I really don’t spend that much money on shoes… So I can do the occasional splurge on plates, right?

Watermelon salad with feta, tomatoes and mint-vinaigrette

Now back to the salad at hand; delicious, fresh, summery with a slight salty taste due to the crumbled feta bits. I’ve had it twice already this week so it must be good. It’s so good in fact that Gizmo almost dove into the bowl before I could pull her out. (see the last photo below) It’s the bits of feta she was after, not the watermelon nor the tomato mind you.

Gizmo dipping her nose in my salad

Watermelon icecream (yes it's yellow watermelon!)

‘Have you made something with your melon yet?’ ‘No, not yet but maybe we should post it together… Wouldn’t that be fun?’ That was more or less the content of the tweets Meeta and I exchanged a mere two weeks ago. You see; after the fabulous Plate to Page weekend there were watermelons left over. I took one home and Meeta took the other one. Naturally, that begged for something to be done with this huge melon and so that’s how another morning discussion started on the Coldcoffeeclub, our post Plate2Page hang out…

Before we knew it, we had gotten ourselves into yet another assignment and  more homework! This time the assignment was photographic; take two photos of a watermelon (or in the absence of watermelons, another melon will do); one raw and one prepared. Now I have to confess that I made this watermelon icecream and by the time we figured out what the assignment was gonna be I had already tossed out the remains of the watermelon and the fruit itself was in our bellies. So I had no raw left. To compensate for that I bought another watermelon, red this time, and prepared a watermelon salad. Delicious too! I will share the recipe for that at a later stage. You can see all the entries for this watermelon contest on the Plate to Page facebook page here or visit the separate blogs of the ‘contestants’. Meeta, Astrid, Arthi, Ishay, Ilva, Jeanne, Mona, Jenn, Jamie and I will add more links once all posts are live!

As far as the watermelon icecream goes; it was delicious although I did have a hard time getting it frozen. I added Grand Marnier into the mix (the original recipe from David Lebovitsch had wodka) which tasted really good but I might have overdone it with the alcoholic contents meaning the ice did not freeze very well. I manage to get two fairly decent balls after one day in the freezer…