Pasta with Melon

This is an oddball combination, at least to me.  Melon is one of those fruits that I'm never quite sure what to do with, besides eating it straight.  You can't really cook with it (can you?), and it's too watery to bake with, so I guess you're left with eating it cold on a hot day.  Which is awesome.  But it's hard to eat a whole melon by yourself as a single person, and it's even a lot of fruit for two.  Those baby watermelons seem to be the way to go, except that's a lot of preparation costs for not a lot of fruit (thanks, optimal foraging theory), and the pre-sliced saran-wrapped chunks you can buy at the store never look quite as appealing.

It just doesn't seem like this would go well with pasta, right?

Rhubarb Snack Cake

Rhubarb was one of those fruits / vegetables that took me a long time to come on board with.  When I was a kid, it was mostly that I was terrified of dying from eating poisonous rhubarb leaves - although I was pretty excited about the opportunity to eat what looks like red celery.  Cool!  I worked my way into it as an adult when I spent a week in Anchorage a few years ago right when rhubarb was in peak season.  That was my introduction to rhubarb-based desserts (how many people say that about Anchorage?).  Over the years, I've made a few of my own, but I've yet to find a go-to rhubarb recipe that I can't get enough of.  The closest I've come was a friend's rhubarb sour cream cake that I neglected to get the recipe for when I had the chance.

Rhubarb, also called pie-plant.