How to cut a watermelon

I love fruit. But I am put off by fruit plates. You know the ones I mean - with the tasteless cantaloupe and honeydew wedges? And maybe a few shriveled grapes. Or strawberries that look like strawberries, but really don’t taste like them.

It's no wonder when I was put in charge of the fruit plate for Tina’s shower, I wasn’t looking forward to it. Maybe I could make it look really pretty? I googled “fruit for a baby shower” and found truly disturbing images of a watermelon cut into the shape of a baby carriage, with half a peeled cantaloupe representing the baby's head and blueberries for  eyes. Creepy. And I can't unsee it. Don’t google it; you've been warned.

Instead I decided to just get yummy fruit: cherries, watermelon, an actual ripe cantaloupe, juicy red and green grapes. 

I don't know about you, but one of the things, I don’t like about watermelon wedges is that they are not that easy to eat. You end up with a giant rind that takes up a lot of space on your plate and get watermelon all over your cheeks.  So I once more returned to the google machine and looked for how to cut a watermelon. There’s a lot of weird stuff on this particular subject (shakes head). I went with  watermelon “sticks”. The ratio of fruit to rind was very acceptable, it was simple and didn’t involve any power tools, and it was neat and tidy to eat.

If you’re in charge of the next fruit plate, I’d recommend it.

Cut the watermelon in half and place cut side down. Make slices about 1 inch thick.

Turn watermelon 90 degrees and make the same size slices perpendicular to previous slices.

Remove edge pieces that have minimal fruit on them and use remaining "sticks".

Done!