Food Friday: Frozen Watermelon Margaritas!

Oh yes! Watermelon margaritas!!!

These are so good. They are some sweet slushy goodness I tell ya! The perfect summer party drink. Even though we are, very deliberately, all alone here in South Carolina for the month of July, that has not stopped us from having a few little parties of our own folks! Trust me: 5 people — as long as they are the right people — are plenty of people to make a party! We’ve been whipping up these frozen watermelon margaritas like nobody’s business. Add some nibbles, and some music, and — as Meera is fond of saying — “voila!” — party central!

Ok, these are so easy. And I have a few ideas for you with this one.

But, to begin, here is the recipe:

Frozen Watermelon Margaritas

1. Cut up some watermelon into chunks. Make sure the watermelon is seedless, or be sure to take out the seeds before freezing. Place in zip-lock bags. Layer these as close to single-layers (of the watermelon chunks) as possible. If you are making a lot, you’ll have to use a whole bunch of zip lock bags.
2. Place the watermelon chunks in freezer. The idea is to not have them squish together and freeze into one solid block. You want the watermelon chunks to freeze independently of each other so that they will still be separable chunks once frozen. You can freeze this just a few hours before using, or you can — as we do — leave these in the freezer for as long as you want, so that they are ready to use whenever you want a watermelon marg!
3. The ingredients are as follows — 2 1/2 cups frozen watermelon chunks; 3 T fresh lime juice; 4 oz tequila; 2 oz cointreau; 1 1/2 cup ice. Note: You can substitute the ice for more watermelon chunks if you’d like. Play around with it and see what you think… you might like it really watermelony (is that a word?), or a little less watermelony. Braydon and I aren’t big sweet-drink people, and watermelon can be very sweet, so we prefer to add some ice to keep the sweetness down a bit. But if we were making these for some of our sweet-tooth friends, we’d probably use all watermelon and no ice. This will make 2-3 nice sized drinks.
4. Blend together in a blender. We are sorta pathetic in that we actually bring our Vitamix with us when we travel (I know, I know, we are nutty that way). But we’ve done these in a basic, cheap blender too (before we got our beloved Vitamix), and that is just fine. It might need a little help pureeing if the watermelon is really solid. But it should come together nicely and blend up slushy.
5. Place in glasses of any kind. Margarita glasses are nice, but totally unnecessary. We’ve put these in any and all cups and glasses, and trust me: it doesn’t change the deliciousness of these drinks!

Ok, here are some ideas!!!

• A Cheap Party Drink ~ I keep thinking about how much I wish we had known about this recipe when Braydon and I were in grad school. So, to all our current PhD student blog readers, and other graduate-student-readers (there are lots of you, I know)…. here’s the thing: Ok, these can be CHEAP to make! Right now, at this point in our lives, Braydon and I can afford to splurge on some seriously nice tequila. But it wasn’t too long ago that we were barely scraping by to pay our rent, and we definitely wouldn’t have been buying any fancy tequila. Going out for nice margaritas was not something we could do often (or ever), but we loved to host parties. Here’s the thing: you can make this drink on the super-cheap! Buy a big jug of cheap tequila, some cheap orange liquor (or anything to substitute for the cointreau — you could even just use orange juice), buy some whole watermelons (as far as fruit goes, in summer, this is about as cheap as you can get), and host a Frozen Watermelon Margarita Party this summer. You can make this by the pitcher! And you can serve it with some cheap tortilla chips and salsa! And — wammo! — there you have it! An awesome summer party! I promise: your grad school friends (and all your friends) will love you for it!
• High Brow ~ Serve these margaritas with fresh, homemade guacamole and some nice tortilla chips. I posted from the beach house last summer about our guacamole de molcajete (post is here). We’ve made this guac this summer too, and it is consistently a big hit with our party of five. And so healthy too! (Seriously, if you eat this with fresh tortillas, instead of chips — which the bambinos love to do — it is just yummy healthy goodness!) Photo below is Meera making guac last week. Yummo!
• Low Brow ~ Serve these margaritas with pasteurized, processed (“homemade” and “from scratch”) queso dip. Ok, folks, I don’t allow this very often because it is — truly — probably 100% deadly. But, on occasion, this is a real treat for the J-Ms: good, old fashioned, world-famous, Velveeta Rotel queso dip (post is here). As they say, “it is famous for a reason”… it is just that good! Photo below is the best I could do, a few days ago, out on the back porch, in the semi-dark, with music blaring and my boys devouring this stuff so fast that it is hard to snap a picture quick enough. And… ratcheting it up even further on the “probably deadly” spectrum… have you ever tried Ree Drummond’s “Chile Con Queso, Revved Up” (her recipe is here)? I only make that once every 2-3 years or so (it is just that sinful), but really: that stuff is soooo sinfully good!). Yummo!
• Kid Friendly ~ You can make these margaritas alcohol free! Just substitute orange juice for the tequila and cointreau. Delicious and nutritious! We’ve done this many times by blending up the kids’ version, serving it up, then blending up the grown-ups’ version. Kids love “grown up drinks” (or, at least, mine do). They especially love them if served in a fancy glass, with a garnish or two, a cocktail umbrella, and a straw. You want them to eat more fruit?! Well, there you have it! “Drink your fruit kids!!” They can drink theirs, and you can drink yours! Awesomeness!