Grilled Watermelon Salad

Yep, you read the title correctly: GRILLED watermelon salad. Most people seem a bit shocked when we explain that you actually can and we did grill watermelon.

Now we can't take full creative credit for this one. Upon making our salad we were merely trying to imitate the one we had last week at WhoopEmUp Hollow Cafe in Waitsburg. Trying to recreate our favorite restaurant dishes is always a favorite cooking challenge for us. Trying to identify all the components in a dish and then recreate it at home without a recipe...oh that just gets our cooking juices flowing. Yes, we are cooking nerds for sure.

The salad I had at the WhoopEmUp Hollow Cafe that served as inspiration

It's finally watermelon weather here so we wanted to give this idea a try.

First we sliced some watermelon, not too thick but thick enough not to be cooked through on the grill.

We also sliced some sticks of jicama, red onion and chopped some fresh mint.

We then put it on the grill...

 just long enough to get some grill marks on it.

We created a simple vinaigrette of fresh lime juice, a little honey and some chopped mint.

We layered our salad with the watermelon, toppings and dressing.

What a refreshing salad to go with a rich bbq sauce or a simple light lunch. The mint and lime juice really help create some great depth of tastes to the dish.

We did forget to put the feta cheese on top unfortunately... we had it ready to go and just got too excited I guess and forgot to add it at the end. That component really helps create a more balanced salad so next time we won't forget it.

We loved our version and highly recommend you give it a try. Super simple.