By Last week of finals before Christmas break. The dorm has emptied out steadily since Wednesday as freshmen who’ve already finished their finals early have flown home for the holidays — engineering majors with project-based finals tend to wrap by Wednesday, while writing-heavy majors like mine run all the way through next Friday. The hallways are quieter. The dining hall is half-full at lunch. The kitchen on the second floor has fewer people in it on weekend afternoons.
The seminar workshop final is a fifteen-page essay due Wednesday at noon, and I am writing it about my mother and the kitchen — or rather, I am writing it about the way I learned to read the world by watching her count tip-money on Sunday nights at the kitchen table. The piece is structurally adjacent to the lit-mag essay but goes longer and deeper, takes the same kitchen-as-classroom thread and pulls on it for fifteen pages instead of three. Dr. Choi gave the workshop the assignment three weeks ago with the instruction “write the piece you’ve been waiting all semester to write.” This is mine.
Sunday I made a watermelon basil salad as a small unseasonal Sunday meal because the dining hall had inexplicably had watermelon Saturday afternoon for some reason I have not been able to determine (a holiday-buffet menu mistake? a December delivery from Florida? a chef’s whim?) and I’d picked up half of one from the produce display in the campus store for two dollars when I’d realized the full watermelons on display were going to be marked down further or thrown out by Tuesday. Watermelon in midtown Tulsa in December is a small culinary absurdity, but the watermelon was real and the salad was a chance to get something light on the table during a week when finals-eating had been heavy on dining-hall casseroles and dorm-kitchen carbohydrates.
The technique is dead simple, which is the entire point. The salad assembles in twelve minutes and tastes like June. Three cups of watermelon cubed into one-inch dice (cube it on a cutting board with a generous rim because watermelon throws a lot of juice). A quarter-cup of fresh basil leaves torn at the last minute (don’t chop basil with a knife — the bruising turns the leaves dark; tear them by hand). A half-cup of crumbled feta cheese (the salty briny one from the deli counter, not the pre-crumbled bag, which is dry). A small red onion sliced thin and soaked in cold water for ten minutes to mellow the bite (a soaked-onion trick I’d picked up from a Diana Henry cookbook).
The vinaigrette: three tablespoons of good olive oil, two tablespoons of white balsamic vinegar (white balsamic is the move — regular dark balsamic dyes the watermelon and dulls the visual contrast), the juice of one lime, salt, and a generous turn of fresh black pepper. Whisked in a small bowl. Drizzled over the salad. Tossed gently.
The salad reads as a summer dish — sweet watermelon, salty feta, peppery basil, the sharp acid of the lime and balsamic — but in Tulsa in December it functions as a palate-resetting antidote to the heaviness of finals-week eating. After three weeks of dining-hall casseroles and dorm-kitchen pasta and the bolognese leftovers I’d been working through, the watermelon-basil-feta combination tasted like a vacation.
Dustin came up to the second-floor kitchen at five PM with his laptop and a stack of marked-up printouts of his own final essay for our shared seminar. We ate the salad and split a baguette I’d picked up from the bakery near campus, and worked at the common-room table on our finals papers in parallel until ten PM with two cups of coffee each and the dorm radio playing low in the background. We didn’t talk much. The work was the conversation. The salad was the right Sunday for the week.
The dorm was almost empty around us by Sunday night. Three weeks until I drive down to Memphis with Dustin for the Christmas-Eve-week visit at his family’s, then fly home to Sapulpa from Memphis for Christmas through New Year with my own family. The first semester of college is, against all internal expectation, almost over.
White balsamic, not dark. Soaked red onion. Tear the basil. Here’s the salad.
Watermelon Basil Salad
Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: None | Total Time: 10 minutes | Servings: 6
Ingredients
- 6 cups seedless watermelon, cubed (about 1/2 a small watermelon)
- 1/4 cup fresh basil leaves, torn or thinly sliced
- 2 tablespoons fresh lime juice (about 1 lime)
- 1 tablespoon honey or agave syrup
- 1/4 teaspoon flaky sea salt
- 1/4 teaspoon freshly cracked black pepper
- Optional: 2 oz crumbled feta cheese
Instructions
- Cut the watermelon. Slice your watermelon into roughly 1-inch cubes and place in a large serving bowl. Remove any seeds you find.
- Make the dressing. In a small bowl, whisk together lime juice and honey until combined.
- Combine. Pour the lime-honey dressing over the watermelon and toss gently to coat. Add torn basil leaves and fold in carefully so they don’t bruise.
- Season. Sprinkle flaky sea salt and cracked black pepper over the top. If using feta, add it now.
- Serve immediately. This salad is best fresh. If you need to make it ahead, hold the basil and salt until just before serving so they don’t wilt or draw out too much liquid.
Nutrition (per serving)
Calories: 65 | Protein: 1g | Fat: 0g | Carbs: 16g | Fiber: 1g | Sodium: 100mg