Christmas Piel De Sapo Melon Salad

This melon salad is the easiest salad recipe that tastes like it came from a restaurant. It has 4 ingredients and requires no dressing and takes less than 5 minutes to put together and is so utterly delicious that I suspect you will keep this in your salad repertoire (because I am!). Christmas Melon or Piel De Sapo melons are combined with cucumber, mint and stracciatella cheese for the easiest, most delicious melon side dish ever and there's no need to even make a dressing! I am not even a big melon lover and I absolutely love this melon salad. This is a pushy restaurant quality recipe Dear Reader.

Piel de Sapo (also called Christmas melon, Spanish melon or Frogskin melon) means"toad skin" in Spanish. It is a large, oblong muskmelon with a thick, ridged green rind and pale, juicy flesh. It is native to Spain and is loved for its crisp texture and long shelf life. The reason why it was called Christmas melon has nothing to do with the colour which I initially thought but because it would last until Christmas long after summer harvests. In Spain, it is popular in salads or paired with jamón and cheese.

When I say I'm not a huge melon lover, I mean honeydew or rockmelon. They're great if they're candy sweet or in this delicious rockmelon drink but otherwise I can take or leave them. To me, they're filler in a fruit salad. But Piel de Sapo is a melon that really suits savoury salads because of its crispness and when combined with creamy stracciatella, cucumber and mint, becomes so refreshing and delicious. This tastes like it came from a restaurant because it does. I ate this at a restaurant called Harrison's in Newcastle. They didn't give me the recipe but I don't think you'd even need it it's that simple to make yourself.

Tips For Making This Melon Salad

1 - Start with ripe melon. Piel de Sapo normally has a ridged dark green colour but you want the field spot (where the melon has sat on the farm) to be bright yellow rather than white. We bought a huge one where the yellow actually looked a bit soft but it wasn't. It was perfectly ripe. Keep the melon whole until it ripens and you want to eat it. It really is extraordinary how long this lasts.

2 - This salad doesn't have any dressing and it is still moist and tastes dressed thanks to the interplay between the melon, cucumber, cheese and mint.

3 - Stracciatella cheese is the creamy inside of a burrata and can be found at Italian delis.

4 - Use as much fresh mint as you like!

Dishes That Pair Well With Melon Salad
5 Minute Grilled Scallops
Beef Barbacoa
Pork & Pineapple Skewers
Barbecued Spiced Butter Prawns

Speaking of restaurants, I mentioned yesterday how we went to a weird restaurant. Sophia and I walked into a restaurant that I had heard about on social media. Granted it was mid afternoon when we went there but it was a Saturday and every other restaurant around it had quite a few people in it. The waitress ushered us into the dark rear of the restaurant but when we asked if we could sit in the brighter part she snapped., "They're reserved," gesturing to the 10 or so tables. We looked at each other and whispered, "All of them?".

We sat in a little corner and she slid some menus onto the table and pointed at the QR code gruffly and sauntered off. The menu was quite different to what we were expecting. We had both watched Squid Game and TikTokers had shown a few Squid Game items but in reality it was a fairly regular menu with 2 Squid Game items and some props outside. To make matters more confusing, the number 1 item was a fruit salad for $35 that did not look worth $35, hot chips were $18 and Tteokbokki was $40. We pressed the call button and waited. Five minutes passed then ten minutes. I got up to look for the waitress and she was on the other side of the bar a couple of metres away from us on her phone scrolling social media.

"I'm not feeling this place," I said to Sophia who agreed. We hadn't touched anything apart from the menus. Sophia had also looked up some more recent reviews which were 1 star and we slipped out. The waitress hadn't even noticed. We found a new place for lunch a few minutes walk away and at this hour it was full but we got a table straight away. Sometimes, you just have to cut and run!

So tell me Dear Reader, do you ever cut and run when you see the menu? And do you like eating melon?