Recipe: Watermelon ice cubes

A fun thing to do with the abundance of fresh fruit is to make watermelon ice cubes.Take a watermelon,deseed,cut into chunks and liquify in the blender.Pour into ice cubes trays and freeze.These are great in all sorts of drinks,and look terrific.You also get the benefit of not diluting a drink,just watermelon.Tasty!

Good idea!

I wonder if you could do the same thing with pineapple? I guess you wouldn't want chunks at the bottom of the glass.

Who says you wouldn't want pineapple chunks at the bottom of the glass?!
I kind of like the idea. Actually, I freeze lots of things like fresh squeezed lime juice, lemon juice, etc... I even have a hollowed out pineapple and a coconut with the top cut off in the freezer (probably should start fresh on those, they've been in there a while).
Just this week I tried to freeze Coco Lopez in 1/2 oz. cubes.... oops... too much oil I suppose, because they wouldn't freeze. Now I have two ice cube trays with cold gooey Coco Lopez in them.

-T.J.

My drink the Pahoehoe Flow utilizes frozen cubes of orange and pineapple juice, which are crushed, to make the drink look like lava. The actual drink is a reddish color. I developed this cocktail for the `Ona Tiki Pohaku aa ipu mug.
Juices generally produce a "softer" ice, so they melt faster, which is great for some complex drinks. They cause the drink to change its flavor and color in transition.
I also have a drink called the Surf Creature, after the Miles Thompson painting of the same name, in which pineapple juice is frozen into the bottom of a cocktail glass. This creates a great separation layer of yellow under the bluish green drink.
About half way through the drink the frozen pineapple juice "bottom" floates up, giving it an almost lava lamp effect with the 3-4 blueberries that are floating in the cocktail.

Could you please post the recipe for the Pahoehoe Flow? My cousins love the ice cream drink called the Lava Flow & I'd love to have an alternative to share with them.

Post all of your funky recipes. I wanna try 'em all.

I'll have to pull my ice cube tray out of the cupboard, it's hard to experiment with the automatic cube/crush feature on the freezer door!

This past summer I had two super-ripe watermelons which I knew I wasn't going to be able to use before they went bad. I ran them through my juicer and saved the juice in rectangular plastic freezer containers. Today came an opportunity to use some of the juice in a smoothie but first, the big rectangular chunks of frozen juice had to be broken down into more workable smaller sizes.

In the photo below I show a way to break blocks of juice apart quickly and easily. I use this technique for blocks of soft juices and for blocks of clear ice when I make crystal-clear cocktail ice cubes.

First a photo - then some helpful additional information.

The hand saw is from Dollar Tree where it literally cost $1. The same is true for the rubber mallet. These inexpensive items WORK VERY WELL and help me avoid using (and potentially damaging) other more expensive kitchen utensils. What if you damage the saw? Go get another for a buck. What if you damage the rubber mallet? Then you've done something really really crazy...

The "saw technique" is superior to using a serrated knife. I quickly abandoned the serrated knife method on my first attempt when I was learning to cut clear ice blocks. The saw is dual-purpose (score and cut), it is inexpensive, and I can beat on it with a mallet without any worries.

So how do I use these to cut solid blocks of clear ice? First I score the block by "sawing" a line up to 1/4 inch deep into the ice, then I use the mallet to tap the top of the saw as hard as I need to create a downward fracture. I get surprisingly straight cleavage which is awesome because good cleavage is something that I always appreciate!