A cool, refreshing treat for the unbearably hot months of summer. The melon flavor really shines!

Place half the watermelon, half the lime juice, and half the sugar in a blender. Process until smooth, then pour into a separate bowl. Repeat with other half of ingredients. Pour into same bowl as other batch. Transfer mixture to a 9 x 13 baking dish. Freeze for two or three hours, then begin the process of lightly scraping the top, frozen layer. Return pan to freezer with the shaved ice on top; remove a couple of hours later and continue scraping. Repeat the occasional scraping process until the entire mixture is shaved. Store, covered in plastic wrap, until serving. Serve in pretty glasses with a twist of lime. *Note: if you use a regular watermelon with black seeds, lightly blend the watermelon first, then push through a strainer to get rid of the seeds/seed particles. Then continue the recipe above.

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It’s so hot. I can hardly say anything beyond that. My back is dripping sweat, my brain is fried, and my garden is crying out for relief.

When it’s this hot outside, granita is the perfect treat. And you know what? The name “granita” is unnecessarily sophisticated; it’s basically a glorified slushie. To make granita, you do nothing more than pour a fruity liquid into a pan, then place it in the freezer and use a spoon or fork to scrape the icy mixture as it freezes. It couldn’t be simpler, and there are so many different varieties: just make a liquid out of any fruit, pour it in a pan, and freeze it. Boom! You’ve just made granita.

Here’s a watermelon version. The color is gorgeous, the melon version shines through, and it just sings summer.

You need a watermelon. Try to get your hands on a seedless one; makes things much easier.





Hack into it.

Don’t mess with me. I mean business.





Not pretty, but it doesn’t really matter.

Next time I’ll brandish my machete.





Cut up the watermelon however you like to do things. I’m only using 1/3 to 1/2 of this one, so I’m cutting it into nice pieces so the rest can be slurped down by the kids.





Watermelon is so pretty.

By the way, you might notice that I’ve been cooking/photographing grub up at the Lodge more and more lately. I’ve been doing big cooking days, doing new recipes for both PW Cooks and my next cookbook, and I’ve fallen in love with the light up there.

I have some funny tricks I’ll show you on PW Photography later this week.





Next up, violently slice two limes in half…





And squeeze the juice.





Get about eight cups of large chunks. You can see that this “seedless” watermelon actually has a few piddly seeds. But they’re light and soft–much more palatable than the big black suckers in standard watermelons.





Add the lime juice to the blender (or food processor).





Add some sugar. A little, not a lot, because you want the watermelon flavor to really shine through.





Pack the blender as full as it’ll go…





Then blend it up, piddly seed remnants and all.





Pour out about half the mixture into a bowl, then add the rest of the watermelon and blend it up.

About the seeds: I didn’t mind just pulverizing the soft little seeds in the mixture. They absolutely disappeared, and there wasn’t a speck of one in the finished granita. If you like, though, you can strain the liquid through a mesh strainer before freezing it. And of course, if you wind up using a regular watermelon with big black seeds, you’ll definitely want to strain it first.

This all sounds complicated, but I promise it took all of fifteen minutes.

Maybe fourteen.

Maybe thirteen minutes and forty-seven seconds.

I’ll stop now.

Once all the watermelon, lime juice, and sugar are blended together, just pour it into a 9 x 13 baking dish. Cover it with plastic wrap (I didn’t, actually, because I’m lazy) and freeze it for a good two or three hours for the first step.





Gently scrape the top layer with a spoon or fork.





It’ll be more frozen around the sides.

After that–and once you start to get close to the less-frozen middle, cover the pan and return it to the freezer for another couple of hours.





Repeat this process–freeze for a couple of hours, scrape, return to the freezer, freeze for a couple of hours, scrape, etc. Continue until it’s all scraped!

Note that you can just skip all the in-between steps and freeze the whole thing before you start scraping, but I find that it’s easier–and less muscle-intensive–to do it in stages.





For the final stage, I used a fork. There is no rhyme or reason to whether I use a fork or spoon. It just depends on whether the moon is in the seventh house that day.





Beautiful! The great thing about granita is that the light, scraped ice on top stays perfectly frozen in the freezer. It never clumps up or crystallizes or wigs out or messes up or has an existential crisis. It’s always light, cold, and perfect.





Come to mama. The mercury’s rising outside.





Confession: I was going to save this for my cookbook. But I have a really difficult time having new recipes in the hopper and not sharing them with you here. It’s a problem I have. Send help immediately.

Make granita this week! Serve it in a pretty glass, serve it in a bowl…or just snarf it down right out of the pan as you stand outside the freezer and try to cool down.

Not that I would ever do that.

Enjoy!