Summer Fruit: The Melon Edition

Recipe4Living

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From watermelon to cantaloupe to honeydew, these fleshy fruits are the highlight of our summer. Let these 40+ melon recipes show you why!

Nothing beats the refreshing crunch of a juicy piece of melon! Be it chopped up watermelon for a unique salsa or pureed cantaloupe for a silky summer smoothie, melon has many uses in Recipe4Living's culinary repertoire. While there are hundreds of different kinds of melon, today we're going to focus on the big three of summer: watermelon, honeydew, and cantaloupe!

Watermelon

watermelon

Did you know that watermelon is both a fruit and a vegetable? If you’re in a crunch trying to pack in your recommended daily servings of both, just eat a whole bunch of juicy pink watermelon! Originating in Southern Africa, explorers have found an abundance of watermelon in the Kalahari Desert. Oddly enough, the watermelons also serve as a symbol for the Mexican Day of the Dead and are depicted in a great deal of Mexican art.

When choosing a watermelon, make sure the outside is bright with various shades of green. If you're able to cut into the watermelon, make sure it's flesh is bright pink. Watermelon comes in seeded and seedless varieties. Seedless watermelons are usually much smaller. Shapes and sizes of watermelon do vary across the board as there are 50 different kinds of watermelon.

Click here for watermelon recipes!

Honeydew

This light green refresher is a natural thirst quencher. Juicy and sweet, honeydew has a great mild flavor that makes a perfect dessert or even side dish accompaniment. When choosing a honeydew, look for a creamy white or yellow skin. Yellow skin indicates ripeness while creamy white means the fruit will ripen very soon. Avoid green skin as these honeydew melons will take a long time to become ripe.

Click here for honeydew recipes!

Cantaloupe

Also called muskmelon or netted melon, the cantaloupe is one of the most popular summer melons of choice. Sweet in flavor, a good cantaloupe is easy to select. Simply look for a skin that hasn't been blemished. All cantaloupe exterior has yellow skin with a netting over it but cantaloupes that have been picked too early will have blemishes from wrestling off the plant.

Click here for cantaloupe recipes!