Watermelon: Our ingredient of the week

The Kiswahili word for watermelon is tikiti. The fruit is never out of season in Kenya which also makes it affordable. The cost also depends on your pocket, a slice can go for as  little as Sh10/=. While a whole one goes for between Sh100 to Sh 300. Picking the right melon can be tricky but always go for one that has dents or simply ask the vendor to cut a small piece and taste.

According to Wikipedia, watermelon is a scrambling and trailing vine originally from southern Africa. It is a large, sprawling annual plant with coarse, hairy pinnately-lobed leaves and white to yellow flowers.

It is grown for its large edible fruit, also known as a watermelon, which is a special kind of berry with a hard rind and no internal division, botanically called a pepo. The fruit has a smooth hard rind—usually green with dark green stripes or yellow spots—and a sweet, juicy interior flesh—usually deep red to pink, but sometimes orange, yellow, or white—with many seeds, which can be soft and white or hard and black.

Considerable breeding effort has been put into disease-resistant varieties and into developing a "seedless" strain with only digestible white seeds. Many cultivars are available that produce mature fruit within 100 days of planting the crop. The fruit can be eaten raw or pickled and the rind can be cooked."