cheryl
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Don't trash the best part of the melon - Salon
When you throw out your honeydew and cantaloupe seeds, you're missing the best part
Squash and melons do not seem like fast friends — at least, visually. The former is savory, chewy and often bumpy; the latter sweet and watery. While both squash and melons are generally bulbous, spherical fruits, few people think of a pumpkin or spaghetti squash as a "fruit." Our cultural understanding of the word fruit usually implies something sweet and rich-tasting, though fruit is a scientific term for the seed-bearing object formed from a fertilized flower in flowering plants. (That means that guacamole — being largely avocado, tomatoes, and lemon juice — is technically a fruit salad. Don't @ me.)
But back to melons and squash. These two castes of spherical fruits that grow like bocce balls rolling in the dirt are, it turns out, very closely related. To be taxonomically specific: the Cucurbitaceae family contains all the melons and all the squash under the rainbow, from pumpkins (genus cucurbita) to cucumbers and honeydew (cucumis sativus and cucumis melo, respectively).
Like many genetically similar plants, the same parts of both are edible: the interior flesh, of course, which is what is generally eaten in both cases; the rinds, which are less eaten, although recipes for cooking with, say, watermelon rinds do exist; and most curiously, the seeds.
When you throw out your honeydew and cantaloupe seeds, you're missing the best part
Squash and melons do not seem like fast friends — at least, visually. The former is savory, chewy and often bumpy; the latter sweet and watery. While both squash and melons are generally bulbous, spherical fruits, few people think of a pumpkin or spaghetti squash as a "fruit." Our cultural understanding of the word fruit usually implies something sweet and rich-tasting, though fruit is a scientific term for the seed-bearing object formed from a fertilized flower in flowering plants. (That means that guacamole — being largely avocado, tomatoes, and lemon juice — is technically a fruit salad. Don't @ me.)
But back to melons and squash. These two castes of spherical fruits that grow like bocce balls rolling in the dirt are, it turns out, very closely related. To be taxonomically specific: the Cucurbitaceae family contains all the melons and all the squash under the rainbow, from pumpkins (genus cucurbita) to cucumbers and honeydew (cucumis sativus and cucumis melo, respectively).
Like many genetically similar plants, the same parts of both are edible: the interior flesh, of course, which is what is generally eaten in both cases; the rinds, which are less eaten, although recipes for cooking with, say, watermelon rinds do exist; and most curiously, the seeds.