I discovered a neat way to serve watermelon from my cousin Josie. These handled watermelon spears are easy to prepare and make for mess-free meloning!

Start by picking out the sweetest watermelons at the market. This can be a bit tricky because they don’t ripen after picking, but I’ve found that your senses can help you choose the best from the bunch.

Look

• Watermelons have a light yellow/cream-colored spot somewhere on the bottom where it rested as it grew on the soil. Some people call this the “ripe spot.” If this is greenish or white, this means the fruit isn’t quite ripe yet.
• Look for a spherical watermelon as much as possible. I read somewhere that the rounder the fruit, the higher the pulp-to-skin ratio. This is somewhat mathematical, so I’ll just take the magazine article’s word for it. Haha.
• Blemishes = bad. Choose a watermelon that has no dents, cuts or bruises.

Touch

• The rind should feel firm to the touch, not soft.

Listen

• This is one’s my dad’s trick, and I trust him because he could grow pencils if he just stuck one in a pot. Tap the fruit lightly and expect it to sound hollow. This means it’s full and heavy. (My dad does this to his stomach too, after a full meal, to demonstrate the similarities between a happy tummy and a ripe watermelon! Heehee.)

And now on to the fruit carving! By the way, these work well with small- to medium-sized melons, as the gigantic ones might break.

Bisect your watermelon, and proceed to cut into slivers.

Cut the slivers into wedges. For each wedge, make an L-shaped incision on the bottom right to cut a portion of the rind away.

Do the same for the left. You should have an arrow-shaped piece of watermelon with a bit of rind left at the bottom for holding.

Handy, eh?

I hope you find this useful as summer comes. Portable and beach-perfect food!

Made this reusable grocery tote for my friend Jen two weeks ago. This is for her birthday because she tries to be as eco-friendly as possible, from reusable shopping bags to cruelty-free beauty products. (Hi Jen! You’ll get this bag soon!) I hope to finish up the embroidery for the tote this weekend. The bag itself is made from muslin, which I have tons of from when I used lots of it as a backing for my quilt.

The embroidered little veggie people are iron-on sewing patterns from Sublime Stitching. They were so much fun to work with because you can interchange the faces! I can use the patterns up to eight times, so I’m thinking crafty dishcloths and aprons will give them a second (or third!) life.

The stitch I used to outline the figures is something that I’ve used since I was a kid, when I started to learn how to sew in the third grade. I’d come up with it experimenting with some needle and thread to occupy myself on boring weekend afternoons. I used to run these crazy stitches in random colors and ways on an old cloth table napkin and when my friends would squint at my handiwork and ask what it was, I’d get all huffed up and say, “Duh! It’s called a thread parade!” with a matching dramatic roll of the eyes. Truth is, I just called it that because I didn’t know those stitches’ names, or even what I was making. Haha.

For many years, even up till about six years ago, I honestly thought I had invented the stitch you see on the tote bag. (I’m laughing as I write this.) I used it a lot to outline designs because the thread really pops from the cloth since it’s raised from the surface (the thread doesn’t lie flat like a running or back stitch would). I would start with an outline of backstitches. Then I’d use another length of thread to “coil” around the backstitches. The thicker the “coiling” thread, the more prominent the outline would be. Don’t ask me how I came up with it. I must’ve been really bored as a kid to try something like that!

The discovery of a stitchery encyclopedia in a local library six years ago shattered my dreams of being the Inventor Of The Awesomely Cool Outlining Stitch. In embroidery lexicon, it’s apparently called the Whipped Back Stitch. Sometimes, the second thread is a contrasting color, which gives it an artistic twist (which I never thought of doing when I was “inventing” it, hee.) Photo below courtesy of www.inaminuteago.com.

The lineup of usual suspects on the tote bag also includes fruit like a sexy orange and a sour apple. My brother thinks the onion looks really funny because of the “things coming out of its butt.” Those are just roots, Manong! Hehe.

Hopefully, I’ll power through the rest of this project so I can give it to its rightful owner and it’ll fulfill its eco-bag destiny the next time Jen goes to the grocery. In the meantime, Tomato and Lemon say hi!

Happy weekend, all!

Made these “dirty” cupcakes to celebrate Earth Day. Had loads of fun making them, despite the fact that I baked them on an extremely hot day in Los Angeles, upwards of 90 degrees even at 8:00 at night, with me standing in front of a fan in between batches so I wouldn’t pass out.

I really just wanted an excuse to bake! (Hee.) I feel like I’ve been cooking a lot lately, mostly meals, but not really getting the chance to do my “thing,” that is, to bake something from scratch, make frosting and hunker down to decorate it/them. And since today is Earth Day, I thought these “Earthworms In Dirt” cupcakes would be an apt cure for the baking itch. And really now, how can you go wrong with a chocolate cupcake, covered with chocolate frosting, dipped in crushed Oreos and topped off with a gummy worm?

So, here’s the dirt (pun alert!) on making these awesomely cute chocolatey treats.

Take a chocolate cupcake made with your favorite recipe and frost it with chocolate icing (no need to be perfect since it’s going to be covered up with crushed cookies anyway)…

…dip the cupcake in crushed Oreo cookies (I rolled mine into smithereens with a rolling pin)…

…use the round end of a wooden spoon to poke two holes in the cupcake…

…cut up a gummy worm in half and stick each in the holes you just made, as if you caught the thing mid-burrow!

Fun! Here’s one of my wormy friends chilling among my mom’s violets.

And here are all of them on the kitchen table at work, before they ended up in my co-workers’ bellies!

These would be great for Halloween, too, as truly disgusting desserts.

And, Disneynature’s Earth premieres in theaters today. Buy a ticket during release week and a tree will be planted in your honor in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. I hope to see it this Friday. Watch the awesome trailer—made even more awesome by Sigur Ros’ Hopipolla playing in the background!

Happy Earth Day, you curly worms!

I can’t wait for 500 Days Of Summer. It stars Joseph Gordon-Leavitt and Zooey Deschanel and debuts in theaters in, well, the summer.

Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn’t.

This post-modern love story is never what we expect it to be—it’s thorny yet exhilarating, funny and sad, a twisted journey of highs and lows that doesn’t quite go where we think it will. When Tom, a hapless greeting card copywriter and hopeless romantic, is blindsided after his girlfriend Summer dumps him, he shifts back and forth through various periods of their 500 days “together” to try to figure out where things went wrong. His reflections ultimately lead him to finally rediscover his true passions in life.

I’ve been hounding the WWW for more tidbits about the movie because I’m in love with the tailoring and costumes in it. Its design elements (clothes, sets) have the sort of retro/vintage feel to it that I love….

…and a teaser trailer with an awesome soundtrack. (That’s The Temper Trap’s Sweet Disposition.)

I was racking my brains about why I’m so obsessed with the clothes in this movie, and I realized it’s because they remind me of the clothes designs from Built By Wendy by NYC’s Wendy Mullin.

She has a sewing patterns line in collaboration with Simplicity that I’m collecting. They’re too pretty to use so I just stare at them and sigh. I also have Wendy’s book Sew U: The Built By Wendy Guide To Making Your Own Wardrobe, which comes with patterns, too.

500 Days Of Summer’s release date is July 17. Pass the popcorn!

This is the first post for the Eat My Words project on The Girl With A Curl. Once a week, I’ll be posting a culinary term for anyone interested in expanding their cooking vocabulary. From French stewing techniques to Middle Eastern spices, I’ll try to find obscure, interesting, never-heard-of (at least for me!) words from cooking lore to whet the mind’s appetite. Because don’t you agree—I think words are yummy!

This idea came to me after I recently signed up to receive Merriam-Webster’s Word Of The Day via e-mail. (If you’re interested, sign up for the same HERE.) It’s the first thing I read in the mornings while I’m still bleary-eyed in bed, and I’m beginning to love the ritual of waking up to a new word every day. Last week, after learning about what the word “piebald” meant, I thought that if I had the chance to learn a new cooking term every so often, it would be good exercise for my brain, for this blog, and for my kitchen!

So, here we go with the very first cooking term for Eat My Words, brought to us by the ultimate foodies—the French.

Eat My Words: “Bouquet Garni”

Translated from French to literally mean “garnished bouquet,” it’s a bundle of aromatic herbs either bound together with string or secured in a sachet made of cheesecloth used to flavor soups, stocks or stews. It’s usually removed before cooking but serves to “steep” in the cooking stock much like tea leaves do in hot water. Sometimes these herbs are encased in leek leaves bound with twine, or a coffee filter if you’d like to be un-French about it.

There’s no prescribed set of herbs for a bouquet garni, but this can include parsley, thyme and bay leaf. Any other number and kinds of herbs such as celery, peppercorns, rosemary, thyme, tarragon, etc., are sometimes added to give the cooking stock more complex flavors.

Bouillabaisse and Ossobuco are the more popular dishes that may use a bouquet garni.

* Want to hear how it sounds? Hear it HERE!

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Stay tuned for more short, sweet, spicy, saucy, eatable words!

The L.A. Times/UCLA Festival of Books is almost here!

April 25 & 26, 2009

UCLA Campus

5 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024

I wait all year for the book fest, paying special attention to the kind of folks they’re going to have at the Culinary Stage.In ‘07, I got to meet Bon Appetit magazine’s Editor In Chief Barbara Fairchild and had her autograph this compendium. Needless to say, my curls and I were speechless when I shook her hand at the book signing.

This year, the Culinary Stage doesn’t seem to be jumping, but I’m still going. Especially on Sunday, when Barbara Fairchild will be interviewed onstage by Giada De Laurentiis. I have a book by Giada, and though my fascination for her has waned somewhat over the years, I think it would still be nice to have her sign it.

Other things I’m looking forward to:

Last year the Festival introduced “The Comix Strip,” a new section of the show dedicated to comics, graphic novel and manga publishers, authors and illustrators. The show proved to be an immediate and outstanding success for publishers such as Image Comics and Boom! Studios, with such industry luminaries as Jeph Loeb, Mike Mignola and Steve Niles making appearances. This year’s show is expected to draw from a broad spectrum of prominent speakers and panelists including Ray Bradbury, Clive Barker, Wil Wheaton, Michael J. Fox, David Baldacci, Kate DiCamillo and Christopher Plummer.

* Danica McKellar (Winnie Cooper to you Wonder Years fans) on the LA Times stage on Saturday at 12 noon discussing her book Kiss My Math: Showing Pre-Algebra Who’s Boss.

* A chance to see Ray Bradbury on stage again. I saw him in discussion with Ray Harryhausen once before and though he’s getting on in years, he’s still as inspiring and funny as ever.

* Authors like Eric Carle, Aimee Bender, the WriteGirl crew among many, many others! (I hear Brooke Shields is coming. Hee.)

If you’re in the LA area and you haven’t been to the book fest, my curls and I command you to go! There’s nothing like it.

All details on the festival on the official website HERE.

Yay for bookworms!

From your coffee cup…

…to an ice cream cone!

I found out today that Starbucks recently released new ice-cream versions of their most popular drinks. They had already done this before, but have phased the old flavors out and is releasing this new set with other novelties like ice cream bars.

I’m sort of an odd duck when it comes to coffee. I hate the drink and shun it like a vampire does holy water. But make ice cream with it, and I’m like a moth to a flame!

Aside from the fact that I have a weakness for the stuff, I’m mainly interested in the coffee-flavored cold confections because I imagine they would go well with my favorite Chocolate Cake recipe. If I had the chance and patience, I’d really like to turn any of these into an Ice Cream Bombe. It’s is a dome-shaped dessert that’s made of layers of cake and ice cream, frozen, then unmolded. Doesn’t it look heavenly?

And I’ve always wanted to make homemade ice-cream sandwiches with these molds that look like farmyard animals. Oink! I mean, yum!

Now to find those Starbucks frozen treats!

Have a sweet weekend, all.