A fairly light weekend of cooking for me, all things considered. I spent my time mainly playing around with CSA produce in odd and less odd ways.

First thing I did was reduce a small watermelon down to two and a half inches of thick liquid in a squeeze bottle. The watermelons from the CSA are really good, but they're seedier than a porn shoot at Mos Eisley. So if you try to eat one plain, you'll be spitting seed more than... well, a porn shoot at Mos Eisley.

So I started by trying to extract just the juice of the watermelon. I cut it up, chunked it, and ran it through my food mill, in yet another attempt to find a decent use for my food mill. It was a lot of work - the chunks didn't really want to get under the blades of the food mill, so there was a lot of hand pressure that needed to be applied until things got down to a mush.

After doing about 80% of the work with the food mill, I finished the rest by pressing it with the back of a ladle through a strainer. This gave me probably 3-4 cups of watermelon juice, which was good, but a bit thin. I thought I'd try concentrating the flavors by reducing it, which worked... OK. You trade a lot of the fruity, melony flavors for pure sweetness when you do this, resulting in a syrup that's a bit like an organic Jolly Rancher.

Not sure what I'll do with it - I mainly did it as more of a physics and chemistry thing than a culinary thing.

Oh, and I made Another Damn Salsa. What can I say. I had chips. The base of this salsa was the bounty of poblanos from last week's box. Four of those (they're about 75% smaller than store-bought poblanos) went on the gas fire for roasting. I've only roasted reds before, but the poblanos worked the same way. Char them, cover them, go back to them once they're cool and rinse them.

The diced poblanos joined traditional salsa components. Onion, garlic, minced CSA jalapeno for heat, lime juice, cumin, salt, pepper, and canned diced tomatoes I used to cut down on the liquid. I should have diced them smaller after I drained them, but I was lazy.