the melonmaster.

Every night last week I opened the fridge and removed an ice-cold, perfectly ripe specimen of The Most Refreshing Substance On Earth: the €0.99 Gallia melon from Dirk van den Broek.

This is not one pictured above: this is today's €1.58 Gallia melon. To break up the monotony of beautiful, unadorned melon a little bit, I shzoomed this one up into a refreshing smoothie/shake experiment, which is totally not my usual kind of thing, but in this case I like.

If the buttermilk thing sounds strange to you...yeah, it would've sounded strange to me too at some point. But Holland is one of those places with a bit of a buttermilk lean, along with Scandinavia, the Middle East, India, and some other random, scattered locations (New Zealand?).

If you're not from one of these places, you might think yeah but in the American south buttermilk is all over the place. And I would say to you with an equal lack of punctuation that buttermilk's role in the south is pretty strictly limited to that of an ingredient, something you cook with. Like you would never find it on the menu at your local café under "Beverages", the way you would here. So, yes, buttermilk is a beverage in this country.

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melon, mint, cucumber, buttermilk.

1 Gallia or similar melon, refrigerated

1/2 cucumber

6 fresh mint leaves

3 ice cubes

1 cup buttermilk

1 tbsp honey

a tiny bit of salt

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