What big melons!

My weekly vegetable seller, Leong, likes me. He says if I stand by his stall and talk to people about the use of his produce, he sells out 20 percent faster. I bought half a shark’s fin melon from him on Wednesday. Also known as the ‘spaghetti melon’, Western writers claim that the flesh, when cooked separates into strands like pasta. I pity these Western writers who have so little length of breadth of food to analogy with. Imagine, likening durian to eating cheese in a toilet? Pah!

The hull of the melon. Noted the mottling, which does not appear in the Western variant.

Anyway, in Christine Ingram’s book, Vegetables, An A-Z reference and cook’s kitchen bible, she makes a mention of spaghetti squashes/marrow and suggests that they be boiled after piercing the end so heat can reach to the middle. After 25 minutes, cut the squash lengthways, remove the seeds and fork the strands on a plate. She says the flavour is nearly that of honey and lemon and suggests it served with garlic butter or pesto.

The Asian variety of spaghetti melon is quite different in looks to the Western variety. For one, the skin is mottled green, like lesser sold varieties of zucchini. The seeds are more like those of a pumpkin, as opposed to the gourd-like ones of their North American ones.
I just dumped the half in a pot of water with ikan bilis stock (it’s Friday and I try to be a practicing Catholic and abstain from meat), spring onions and some fresh oyster mushrooms. I let it steam and simmer until the water reduced by ¾.

Top view of the boiled melon. Note the many seeds.

The result? The melon was a young one, so I could eat the very many seeds with the flesh, so that was a mercy, because there are a LOT of seeds and they weave a web around the melon flesh. The flesh looked like glass noodles and acts pretty much like those rice strands, in that they soak up the subtle flavour of the mushrooms and stock.

Erin enjoying the melon.

The melon flesh resembles Chinese glass noodles.

It has a pretty neutral taste, so kids will take quite kindly to it, as Erin shows. The next time I cook up this melon, I will extract some of the seeds before cooking in order to try to germinate a plant of my own. Or, more truthfully, get Kit to do it.