Watermelon and Mango Ice Blocks

How hot does it get in summer where you live? It's been hovering around 32˚C in Hong Kong these few weeks and the humidity only makes it seem hotter.

Ice cream and ice cold drinks are staples of the summer diet, but it's hard to enjoy these treats while maintaining that summer bod you've worked so hard for!

These ice blocks are delicious and healthy, perfect for these hot summer days. All you need is some fresh fruit, which should be abundance at this time of the year! Watermelon and mango is actually a combination I've fallen in love with after trying this flavour combination in a drink.

The watermelon is refreshingly crisp, while the mango is sweet and fragrant. I used Thai mangoes for this, which are yellow and shaped like a leaf. I prefer the mangoness of these compared to the greeny-red round ones. I also added some lime juice to the mangoes just to cut through the richness a little.

Try out these delicious fruity treats and let me know what you think!

Full recipe here --->

Roasted butternut pumpkin spread

I wanted something healthy to snack on and boost my brain power, so I decided to spread some avocado on slices of Ryvita, because, y'know, avocado has good brain boosting fats or something. Only to cut into a very raw avocado. 

Absolutely devastated.

So I had to hunt around my kitchen for something else to snack on. I found a butternut pumpkin lying around (from October probably?!) and thought about making soup. So I peeled it up and cut it into chunks and roasted it in the oven with some olive oil and salt and pepper.

30 minutes at 200˚C in my fan oven, and it's perfect. It's lovely and soft, still moist and just starting to caramelise around the edges. It was just too good to make into soup.

I was just going to eat it on the Ryvita, but it was not an easy feat. The pumpkin chunks don't stay on and you have to manoeuvre the crispbread carefully so that it doesn't wobble, crack and fall apart when you bite into it. So I decided to squash the pumpkin into the crisp bread a little, so it had a bit more staying power.

Then I thought, why not mash it all? 

Then you get a bowl of golden mush. Sweet, buttery, nutty, mush. I didn't add anything to it, but you could plop in a blob of butter to make it extra buttery.

It's quite a chunky spread, you could pulse it through a food processor if you like. I like mine chunky and 'rustic', ha. I love how they call things that look a bit rough and ready, not neat and pristine, 'rustic'. Makes it all okay. =) 

It spreads easily enough anyway onto the Ryvita crispbread, and allows me to get a nice and thick layer on.

Super quick and easy, this will last me days! It's not a recipe as such, just another way to eat butternut pumpkin if you're looking for a delicious, surprisingly filling, healthy and brain boosting snack!