Happy Canada Day! Let’s Make Watermelon Granita!

This pink frozen treat is far from being bright red to celebrate Canada Day but it was the best I could do!

As you know, I have been trying to save money thanks to needing to get a new roof which we now have, feel free to come check it out. One way of course to save a few bucks is to buy produce that has been reduced for a quick sale. My store does this all the time and I have figured out which things to look for and what to avoid.

Tomatoes, lemons, grapefruit and bananas (if you have a generous freezer) are good choices. Avocados, grapes, cucumbers and now I include watermelon to the bunch you want to avoid. Yes, I might have paid only $2 for this little watermelon but it had ZERO flavour! So what to do with it? Make a granita!

In batches, put the peeled watermelon into a food processor and puree until smooth.

Because this is a small watermelon I put only 3/4 cup of sugar into 1/2 cup of water and brought to a boil, then simmered for five minutes.

Normally you do a 1/1 ration of water to sugar but because I did not want to wait around for this to cool I did a trick I learned from Jamie Oliver. I initially used less water and then threw in some ice cubes to cool it down at the end. Love that trick and use it all the time!

Mix it all together and put in a long casserole dish. For those who are fussy about texture, feel free to strain.

Put in the freezer and then scrape with a fork after the first 45 minutes. Then keep scraping every 30 minutes or so until you have the texture you want.

I am pretty forgetful so mine turned out lumpier than it should but who cares, right? I just did not want that watermelon ending up in the compost and wasting money when here I was trying to save some!

Pretty tasty for a fruit that appeared to have no flavour at all. The granita on its own was tasty but this is how we really enjoyed it:

I loved filling up a glass with the granita and then topping it with pink lemonade. Perfect for a holiday! The watermelon and lemonade were fabulous together. We have been enjoying this cold treat all week. For a little kick, I bet a bit of gin in this would be fantastic!

We had another mostly-dark week but shockingly the sun is here now and may actually stick around for most of the weekend, the temperature hovering around 20C. I can hardly believe it!

So cheers and Happy Canada Day to my Canadian friends today and Happy Fourth of July to our neighbours to the south on Monday!