Water Melon Rind Chutney

It's water melon season and we buy almost one melon per week.

Photo by Prathyush Thomas,

My mother-in-law, who was a Malayalee, once told me that the white part of melon rind could be used as a substitute for Kumbalanga or winter melon. This white fleshed pumpkin is a frequent ingredient in Kerala cuisine. I have often made a simple dish which I learned from her using this substitute: a mulakushyam . The recipe in the link is almost similar to how I learned it:

Mulakushyam

Ingredients:
1 cup tuvar dal
1 cup chopped kumbalanga
1 or 2 green chillies
A pinch of turmeric powder
Salt to taste
A few curry leaves
A few drops of coconut oil

Method

Wash the dal and cook it with about 2 cups of water. When it is nearly soft, add the cubed vegetable and salt and turmeric and continue to cook till the vegetable is soft. 

Add the green chillies (slit if you like the heat or un-slit if not or not all if you can't take the heat). 

Take the vessel off the fire and add fresh curry leaves and a drizzle of coconut oil.

Since this gourd is hard to find in North India, I delight in using melon rind in summer.

I've had to become more adventurous as the quantity of melon rind is more than I can cope with using only the one recipe.

I've made a chutney over the weekend which tastes quite like coconut chutney.

We morphed the recipe a lot - merely roasted the dals and some red chillies and the rind and ground them coarsely and tempered with mustard seeds, curry leaves, a red chilli and some channa and split white urad dal.

I'm still in the throes of trying to make a melon rind candy. There seem to be a lot of things one can do with melons!