Watermelon Stir Fry

Eating food that (you think) is inedible

So here’s something different for this post: Tove wants to gather content for people who don’t like to cook. Although this really isn’t a cooking blog, I think there’s a genuine need for this kind of material to help out people who can’t cook, or just hate cooking.

But there’s also another reason I want to do this. I want to encourage people to go easier on Planet Earth whenever doing that directly benefits them. Shaming people into making sacrifices for the environment, or threatening people into making sacrifices for the environment, or terrifying people into making sacrifices for the environment, doesn’t really benefit the environment so much as it polarizes the issue and makes people think “well if it’s me or the environment, maybe I’ll wait until the UN does something about it.” The only thing worse than this is performative environmentalism—you know, that thing lifestyle environmentalists do to “help the Earth” like fly to environmental conferences, join protests on Earth Day, tweet against Trump, and spend inordinate amounts of money buying fair trade organic locally sourced vegan food.

Genuine environmentalism just requires reducing your footprint, and there are few better ways of doing this than reducing what you consume—reusing bags, walking or biking rather than driving, turning off the heater, and eating less meat all works. A good general rule of thumb is that spending money is bad for the environment. In many cases, it’s also bad for you: your body wants to be exercising by walking, carrying, using tools, and moderating temperature on its own. Lying by the heating vent next to a pile of candy wrappers as you scroll through cat memes is a good recipe for obesity.

What’s the alternative?

Cooking on a Stove

Lots of people think cooking is boring and hard. To a certain extent this is inevitable; many manual activities we do as a part of daily living, like brushing your teeth or doing the laundry, do seem pretty dull.

We tend to draw the obvious conclusion from this, and assume that all manual tasks are boring. But this is a misperception. In most cases, what makes these tasks dull is that they are repetitive, and involve almost no skill. Quiet manual activities are actually remarkably rewarding.

The reason for this comes down to our anatomy—one of the most unusual features of our lineage is our hands. Our hands are mentally “close” to us, in part because more of the brain is dedicated to the hands than to other regions of the body.

This is why so many therapies and hobbies help to calm people down. It’s easy to explain the calming effects of petting furry animals¹ or playing video games before surgery² by talking about animals being cute or video games being fun. But nobody talks about things like crocheting being fun—except for people who actually crochet.³

Using our hands is what we evolved to do. And more than that: Very likely, it’s why we evolved intelligence. When primatologists analyzed the features of different lineages like group size, dietary characteristics, innovation and deception, they found that the strongest links to cognitive development were tool use and extractive foraging—meaning, solving natural puzzles required to find, open up, and consume food.⁴

This is what you’re doing every time you hold a tool in your hand and use it to crack a nut, peel an orange, or cut a bad spot out of a potato. To carry out this primordial task, our hands and our brains evolved together as a reciprocal unit that reaches out and connects us to the world around us; summarizing a large body of research into human cognition, the authors of a 2017 study write:⁵

Overall, the hand seems to reflect our mind, expressing our innermost thoughts and wishes (Lundborg 2013). No wonder the hand has a privileged role in the expressive communication of emotions, feelings, ideas, and intentions (see also Lhommet and Marsella 2015). Hands help us learn, as in language learning (e.g., Goldin-Meadow 2014) or learning mathematics (e.g., Novack et al. 2014; Alibali and Nathan 2012). Hand gestures thus stimulate our cognitive ability (Goldin-Meadow 2014), facilitate learning (Kirschner 2002) and trigger our memory system (e.g., Rowe et al. 2008).

Small surprise then that the physical act of cooking—cutting, measuring, pouring, and stirring ingredients together—is directly associated with mental health.⁶ Cooking also improves our relationships with others.⁷ It’s even shown modest benefits as a therapy,⁸⁹ and in the rehabilitation of criminals.¹⁰

So the obvious takeaway here is that you should fry melon rinds up with onion and eat it with your buddies.

Watermelon Rind Stir Fry

No, I’m not telling you to fry watermelon (though you can). Just fry up the rind left over after everybody’s done with the juicy insides. You were just going to throw it away, anyway, so what do you have to lose? You should add some cooking oil, an onion or two, and then some sugar and salt, but that’s basically it. There’s no need for a recipe, no need for measuring everything out; just follow the directions on this one and you’re good.

The Directions:

Go buy a watermelon; small is fine. I know, normally you want a big watermelon so that the volume-to-area ratio is maximized, but no need to care about that right now: you’re eating the rind.¹¹

Don’t leave the store yet! Also get a few onions and some neutral cooking oil, like canola oil.¹² Maybe also think about whether you have salt and sugar? Or a pan? Or a stove? (Frankly though if you’re worried about all that then maybe cooking isn’t for you right now, IDK)

Now you’re done. Go home, and get ready to use your hands for about 20 minutes:

1. Cut up the watermelon, serving out the insides you cut free of the rind to your friends.

2. Slice up the rind into a lightly oiled pan. Cover and leave this on medium heat for about 10 minutes. (If this is the first time you’re doing this, go ahead and stir occasionally as you get a feel for what’s going on—the melon rind takes a lot of cooking, but you want it to get done at the same time the onions do, so if it starts to brown, go to the next step.)

3. Pull off the cover, cut up an onion or two, and add this to the pan.

4. Leaving the cover off of the pan, turn up the heat to high or medium-high. Add another teaspoon of oil if the pan is looking dry, and stir the rinds and onions as they all begin to brown for a few minutes.

5. Add a tablespoon of sugar and a half-teaspoon of salt, continuing to stir for another couple of minutes. The sugar will coat the onion and watermelon, and help it brown.

6. Turn the heat off and eat it when it looks like this:

Fry the watermelon rind, then the onion, then add a bit of sugar and salt. That’s it

This is incredibly easy and tastes lovely—raw watermelon rinds are very tough, but they soften to taste something like cucumber, and make for a great vegetable dish.

If you’re an OK cook, you can add a bit of chicken along with onions, and maybe also a bit of cooked rice, tomatoes, and a few peanuts after the onions. Stay away from dried garlic, but if you add fresh garlic and a bit of pepper and ginger, this creates a very well rounded meal with a slightly Asian feel.

If you’re a great cook, you can use ghee instead of canola oil, peel the very outermost layer of the rind, and add this long list of spices to make watermelon rind curry:

• ½ teaspoon cumin seeds

• 5 cloves garlic minced

• 1 inch ginger minced

• ½ serrano pepper seeds removed, minced

• 1 teaspoon paprika

• 1 teaspoon coriander powder

• ½ teaspoon amchur dried green mango powder

• ¼ teaspoon turmeric powder

• ¼ teaspoon garam masala (save until right at the end)

I’ve never done this, but I’m told these spices taste great.

How to Sell This to Other People

If you live in red tribe territory, talk about how eating watermelon rinds is a great way of saving money and eating healthy. If you’re feeling creative, you can make up a story about how this is a traditional dish served by your great-grandmother to your relatives when they were going through hard times during the Depression, or the last time the Democrats were in office.

If you live amongst the blue tribe, really play up the way you are reducing waste, making fewer trips to the store, and saving the Earth with this environmentally friendly vegan dish. If you’re feeling creative, you can make up a story about how your Indian-Thai fusion cuisine is comprised of locally sourced free trade organic heirloom produce.

If you are interested in knowing whether the children will eat this, the answer is Are you kidding? There’s onions in it. But they definitely will eat the inside of the watermelon, smear it all over the floor, and leave you to clean up the mess.

So long as you’re developing some modest skill at frying things, though, children are way, way more exited about what you can do with apples:

Fried Apple Pie

Say you don’t have watermelon, but you do have about two bags of free, low quality apples and no idea what to do with them. Try this:

1. Cut up the apples and throw away the cores.¹³

2. Fry the apples in a lightly oiled pan on medium-high heat for about 5 minutes.

3. Add a handful of oats, a tablespoon or two of sugar, a dash of salt, and another teaspoon of oil if the pan is looking dry.

4. Turn the heat off and eat it when it browns enough to look like this:

Two large bags of low-quality green apples were given to us for free, because the person who picked them didn’t like them. But adding oil, sugar, and oats made such a great dessert that it came as a major disappointment to my family once the apples were all gone.

If you’re an OK cook, you’ll add a handful of crushed walnuts or pecans along with an extra tablespoon of sugar; then when the heat is off, put in a teaspoon of cinnamon, and a dash of nutmeg, ginger, and cloves.

But regardless of how good a cook you are, you’ll definitely want to serve this with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, just as you would a regular slice of all American apple pie.

Kids love it. Friends and neighbors love it. Really, everyone loves it so much it probably satisfies ethica pomi, and if you don’t know what that is, click the link!

Other Things You Can Fry

I called this post Watermelon Stir Fry, but I could just as easily have called it Dandelion Stir Fry or Thing Stir Fry. Because if something is edible, chances are you can chop it up and fry it in a little bit of oil.

Food.

Seriously once you know how to do this, you can cook something yummy from virtually any ingredients—all kinds of produce, nuts, fungi, meat, flowers, whatever. Chop it up, stir it around, and eat it. You do have to experiment a bit to see what goes with what; I wouldn’t put sugar in everything, right? But so long as you start simply with only a few ingredients at a time, the only real skill required is knowing what to add first:

• Potatoes, watermelon rinds (these take quite a while)

• Broccoli stumps, beets, onions, carrots, apples, chicken

• Broccoli crowns, brussels sprouts, dandelion flowers, kale, corn, cooked rice

• Raw garlic, celery, dandelion greens, button mushrooms, walnuts, an egg, sugar (as your dish is getting done)

• Most spices, soy sauce, vinegar, cooking wine (just after you turned off the heat)

• Lemon juice (after it’s served—so very, very good on most vegetable dishes)

So that’s the way to do it. Eat healthily, eat at home, stay away from McDonalds, reduce your environmental footprint, spend less money, lose weight, build skills, grow strong, rule the save the Earth. Save. And:

1. Shiloh, S., Sorek, G., & Terkel, J. (2003). Reduction of state-anxiety by petting animals in a controlled laboratory experiment. Anxiety, stress, and coping, 16(4), 387-395.

2. Patel, A., Schieble, T., Davidson, M., Tran, M. C., Schoenberg, C., Delphin, E., & Bennett, H. (2006). Distraction with a hand‐held video game reduces pediatric preoperative anxiety. Pediatric Anesthesia, 16(10), 1019-1027.

3. Burns, P., & Van Der Meer, R. (2021). Happy Hookers: findings from an international study exploring the effects of crochet on wellbeing. Perspectives in public health, 141(3), 149-157.

4. Reader, S. M., Hager, Y., & Laland, K. N. (2011). The evolution of primate general and cultural intelligence. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 366(1567), 1017-1027.

5. Radman, Z. (Ed.). (2013). The hand, an organ of the mind: What the manual tells the mental. MIT Press.

6. Utter, J., Denny, S., Lucassen, M., & Dyson, B. (2016). Adolescent cooking abilities and behaviors: Associations with nutrition and emotional well-being. Journal of nutrition education and behavior, 48(1), 35-41.

7. Mosko, J. E., & Delach, M. J. (2021). Cooking, creativity, and Well‐being: An integration of quantitative and qualitative methods. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 55(2), 348-361.

8. Farmer, N., Touchton-Leonard, K., & Ross, A. (2018). Psychosocial benefits of cooking interventions: a systematic review. Health Education & Behavior, 45(2), 167-180.

9. Kuroko, S. (2019). Immediate and longer-term effects of a cooking intervention on adolescents' mental well-being, fruit and vegetable intake, and cooking involvement, self-efficacy and attitudes (Doctoral dissertation, University of Otago).

10. Parsons, J. M. (2017). Cooking with offenders to improve health and well-being. British Food Journal, 119(5), 1079-1090.

11. IDK maybe most people don’t actually know about the square-cube law, but trust me on this, physics says a bigger melon gives you more insides for the amount of rind on the outside.

12. Yes there are better oils, and if you’re a decent cook you’ll know what I’m talking about. On the other hand they’re more expensive, and I don’t really want to dive into an extensive evaluation of cooking oils today, so whatever, just don’t use olive oil for this one.

13. Sorry, no “Fried Apple Core” dishes today, since the apple seeds contain cyanide. Granted a few dozen seeds are not enough to kill you, but they will be enough to make your friends pass on your clever apple core dish.