Indulge your inner child—make gourmet all-fruit popsicles from leftover fruit.
WASTE NOT |
One of the ways I spend smart is to estimate just how much food to buy and prepare for each meal to prevent waste. Sometimes I aim for a little more if it’s a dish I know the family likes left over. But for meals with a definite sell-by date, I like to be bang on.
With summer fruits, it is especially hard to judge how much to buy, particularly if it’s something I’ve picked up at a farm stand or market at its luscious peak of ripeness. That flat of invitingly beautiful strawberries might just be too much for one family to reasonably shortcake their way through.
My favourite way to enjoy extra overripe fruit happens to be the most fun and easy: a quick whirr in the blender, and I’ve got the makings for nutritious fruit popsicles. All-fruit popsicles look (they’re typically textured) and taste nothing like the coloured sugar-water popsicles most of us are familiar with, and they are certainly healthier.
You can buy expensive all-fruit popsicles at the grocery store , but why would you want to when they are so simple to make from scratch? To get started, you will need plastic ice pop moulds. If you don’t have any, consider buying moulds like the ones I got recently at Bed, Bath & Beyond that are the size and shape of traditional ice cream bars. They come with their own plastic handles, which I don’t use because I prefer wooden crafts sticks. If you don’t want to invest in moulds, small plastic containers like individual yogurt cups work just fine.
My Recipe For All-Fruit Popsicles
To make your ice pops, all you do is wash and cut up fruit, then purée it in the blender, adding liquid if you need to. It’s that simple. As for liquid, any kind of juice is good (I like lemon), and so are milk, yogurt and water.
You don’t need to add sugar (or Splenda or stevia), but I do because sometimes the fruit has a bitter edge. Once your mixture is blended just the way you like it, pour it into the moulds. If you are using store-bought ones, pop on the handles and freeze. If you plan to use wooden sticks (or even plastic spoons), after about an hour in the freezer, insert them into the partially frozen fruit. This method works with pretty much any fruit I’ve tried.—Terri Brandmueller
Plastic popsicle moulds are $3.49 (for a set of four) at Bed, Bath & Beyond in North Vancouver. Michaels has wooden crafts sticks.
Source Frugalbits
