Celebrate July 4th with Homemade Popsicles

If you're expecting a sunny 4th of July, you'll need some cool treats to help you celebrate until the evening's fireworks.  Carla Emery shares her recipes for easy and delicious homemade popsicles.

These are cheap, easy, and even more fun for children than going to the store. Children like strong, sweet juices like grape and cranberry for popsicles—but when kids are hot, anything will do. My little ones enjoy goat’s milk popsicles. Popsicle making is a nice way to use leftover juices from canned fruit, too.

OF HANDLES AND MOLDS

You can use wooden sticks for handles and sturdy small bowls or cans for containers—work up a collection. Or buy popsicle molds; Tupperware and Back to Basics carry them. If you have a big family or lots of small friends, I recommend getting at least 2 molds so you can have one freezing while they are consuming the other. You can even make parfait popsicles by freezing a layer of one color and then a layer of another color. My plastic holders soon got lost or fell apart, but then we substituted sticks in a bowl or can and were fine. Fill the molds not quite full, insert your holder, and freeze.

UNMOLDING

Don’t let the gremlins pull the holders until you’re sure the center of the popsicle is solidly frozen and you have loosened the sides by running hot water over the back of the mold. Otherwise they might pull out the holder prematurely, leaving a hole that it won’t freeze back into. You don’t have to unmold all the popsicles at once. Just loosen as many as you need. Refill the emptied units and return to the freezer.

BASIC FRUIT POPSICLES

Puree 1 cup any kind of fruit or a mixture of fruit and mix with 1 cup water. Pour into your ice cube tray. When they are starting to freeze, add a wooden stick or toothpick to each section. 

PUDDING POPSICLES

Susan Staley was in Germany when she sent me this recipe. She said, “If your children love the Fudgsicle-type popsicle, you can easily make them. Just make up a batch of pudding and freeze it in your popsicle molds. They’re delicious and you can make different kinds beside chocolate. Butterscotch is very good. In fact, any flavor of pudding your children love hot, they’re bound to like cold in hot summer weather.”

ANY FRUIT ICE

You could juice pomegranates or barberries or red currants, or cook and strain quinces, or grate pineapple, or boil and pulp apples or rhubarb—whatever you have. Sweeten to taste, add lemon juice if the flavor needs it, and freeze.

GINGER ALE JUICE

Combine ¾ cup sugar and 2 cups water. Heat and boil 5 minutes. Cool. Add 1 cup orange juice, ½ cup lemon juice, and 2 bottles ginger ale. Freeze.

Early Summer Harvest: Beets!

It's been a sunny June in the Northwest, and beets are popping up everywhere — on restaurant menus, at farmers markets, and hopefully in your garden! Carla Emery shares tips on canning and preparing, and a few recipes for enjoying your beets. 

Canning: First scrub roots very well. Then precook by either baking or boiling because raw-packing is not recommended for beets.

• Precooking by Baking. Cut off tops and roots. You can put beets of any size together in the oven (conventional or microwave). They're all cooked when the biggest one is done. Then pour cold water over the hot, roasted beets, and you'll be able to slip off their skins. Dump the water.

• Precooking by Boiling. Remove the entire beet top except for the closest 1-2 inches of stem. Leave the roots on; that keeps them from "bleeding" (losing nutrients). Sort beets according to size, and boil similar sizes together so they'll get done at about the same time. When fork-tender (in about 30 minutes), move them into cold water. Slip off skins, stems, and roots.

• Cutting Up. You cut up beets to improve and even out heat penetration in your jar. If baby beets are smaller than 2 inches wide, they can be left whole. If they're larger, cut them into 1⁄2 - inch cubes. Or slice 1⁄2 inch thick, and then quarter the slices.

• Packing and Processing. Pack beets into hot jars. Cover with boiling water, leaving 1⁄2 inch headspace. Optional: Add 1⁄2 t. salt/pt., 1 t. salt/qt.; add 1 T. vinegar/pt., 2 T./qt. to preserve color. Process in a pressure canner only: pints for 30 minutes, quarts for 35 minutes. If using a weighted-gauge canner, set at 10 lb. pressure at 0-1,000 feet above sea level; set at 15 lb. at higher altitudes. If using a dial-gauge canner, set at 11 lb. pressure at 0-2,000 feet above sea level; 12 lb. at 2,001-4,000 feet; 13 lb. at 4,001-6,000 feet; 14 lb. at 6,001-8,000 feet; or 15 lb. above 8,000 feet.

Pickled Beets: Start by carefully scrubbing 7 lb. of beets (2 to 2 1⁄2 inches in diameter) to remove all dirt. Now trim off beet tops, leaving on 1 inch of stem and roots to prevent nutrient loss. Wash well. Sort by size. Cover size-grouped  beets with boiling water and cook until tender (25 to 30 minutes). Drain and discard liquid. Cool beets. Trim off roots and stems and slip off skins. Slice into 1⁄4 - inch slices. Peel and thinly slice.

Combine 4 c. vinegar (5 percent), 1 1⁄2 t. canning or  pickling salt, 2 c. sugar, and 2 c. water. Put 2 cinnamon sticks and 12 whole cloves in a cheesecloth bag and add to vinegar mixture. Bring to a boil.

Add beets and 4 to 6 onions (2 to 2 1⁄2 inches in diameter). Simmer 5 minutes. Remove spice bag. Fill pint or quart jars with hot beets and onions, leaving 1⁄2 inch headspace. Adjust lids. Process either pints or quarts in boiling-water canner. At up to 1,000 feet above sea level, process 30 minutes; at 1,001–3,000 feet, 35 minutes; 3,001–6,000 feet,  40 minutes; and above 6,000 feet, 45 minutes.

Pickled Whole Baby Beets Follow above directions, but use beets that are 1 to 1 1⁄2 inches in diameter. Pack whole; don’t slice. You can leave out the onions.

Preparing

Eating Baby Beets. Thinning beets has a really good side. You can eat the thinnings. Eat the tops like greens. If they're big enough to have roots of any development, eat both tops and roots together. I boil top greens and bottom root with bacon and add butter at serving time. Delicious! I like beets best of all at the "baby" stage - that's around 1 1⁄2 to 2 inches in diameter, about the size of a radish. Baby beets are also nice for eating, freezing, canning, or pickling.

Precooking Beets to Eat Fresh. Cut off tops. You may or may not leave a stub (leaving it prevents nutrient loss). Cover with boiling water, and boil until the beets are slightly soft to the touch. Another way to precook beets is to bake them in the oven. The bigger they are, the longer it takes. Drain and slip off the skins; no peeling is necessary. Cut off any remaining root tail and the stalk stub.

Recipes

Quick Beet Soup: Combine 2 c. milk, 1⁄2 c. beet juice, and seasonings.

Cold Beet Salad: Cook 1 lb. beets until tender. Cool, peel, and slice thinly. Combine 4 T. vinegar, 4 T. water, 1⁄2 t. sugar, 2 1⁄2 t. caraway seeds, 1 chopped small onion, 1 t. ground cloves, 1 bay leaf, salt, pepper, and 4 T. oil. Pour over  beets and let marinate several hours before serving.

Orange/Beet Juice: From Ruth of Bonaire: "Make fresh orange juice - enough to fill the blender two-thirds full. Then add 1⁄4 c. peeled, cubed raw beet. Blend and then pour through a strainer, a bit at a time, mashing pulp with a spoon to extract the maximum amount of juice. You can eat the pulp-it's sweet! This juice looks and tastes like red Kool-Aid!"


NOTE: Fresh garden beets have more color than most digestive systems can absorb, so your resulting bowel movement may appear to have “blood” in it. That’s just beet color. Eating beets is absolutely not harmful — on the contrary, beets are very nourishing. And they’re not harsh to digest, only startling to view in that manner.

Cool Down with Homemade Popsicles

These are cheap, easy, and even more fun for children than going to the store. Children like strong, sweet juices like grape and cranberry for popsicles—but when kids are hot, anything will do. My little ones enjoy goat’s milk popsicles. Popsicle making is a nice way to use leftover juices from canned fruit, too.

OF HANDLES AND MOLDS

You can use wooden sticks for handles and sturdy small bowls or cans for containers—work up a collection. Or buy popsicle molds; Tupperware and Back to Basics carry them. If you have a big family or lots of small friends, I recommend getting at least 2 molds so you can have one freezing while they are consuming the other. You can even make parfait popsicles by freezing a layer of one color and then a layer of another color. My plastic holders soon got lost or fell apart, but then we substituted sticks in a bowl or can and were fine. Fill the molds not quite full, insert your holder, and freeze.

UNMOLDING

Don’t let the gremlins pull the holders until you’re sure the center of the popsicle is solidly frozen and you have loosened the sides by running hot water over the back of the mold. Otherwise they might pull out the holder prematurely, leaving a hole that it won’t freeze back into. You don’t have to unmold all the popsicles at once. Just loosen as many as you need. Refill the emptied units and return to the freezer.

BASIC FRUIT POPSICLES

Puree 1 cup any kind of fruit or a mixture of fruit and mix with 1 cup water. Pour into your ice cube tray. When they are starting to freeze, add a wooden stick or toothpick to each section. 

PUDDING POPSICLES

Susan Staley was in Germany when she sent me this recipe. She said, “If your children love the Fudgsicle-type popsicle, you can easily make them. Just make up a batch of pudding and freeze it in your popsicle molds. They’re delicious and you can make different kinds beside chocolate. Butterscotch is very good. In fact, any flavor of pudding your children love hot, they’re bound to like cold in hot summer weather.”

ANY FRUIT ICE

You could juice pomegranates or barberries or red currants, or cook and strain quinces, or grate pineapple, or boil and pulp apples or rhubarb—whatever you have. Sweeten to taste, add lemon juice if the flavor needs it, and freeze.

GINGER ALE JUICE

Combine ¾ cup sugar and 2 cups water. Heat and boil 5 minutes. Cool. Add 1 cup orange juice, ½ cup lemon juice, and 2 bottles ginger ale. Freeze.

[Excerpted from the “Sugaring and Fruit Preservation” section in Chapter 7: Food Preservation. Additional recipes include: Root Beer Ice, Strawberry or Raspberry Ice, Frozen Fruits. Illustration copyright 1994 by Cindy Davis.]

7 Ways to Keep a House Cool without Air Conditioning

1. If you cook, bake, and can in the house rather than in an outdoor summer kitchen or campfire, do it in the evening so the house will have all night to cool off. But minimize cooking by serving salads, raw fruit, cool herb teas, and grilled or quickly heated foods.

2. Get cool indoors. After the sun goes down and the outside air becomes cool, open all your windows and get as much of that good cool air inside as possible. Using fans, especially an attic fan, will help accomplish that quickly. (A fan doesn't need as much energy as does air conditioning, and it doesn't use chemical refrigerants!) In the morning, close all your windows to keep in that wonderful cool night air you collected. 

3. Ceiling fans are inexpensive to operate and can help keep rooms cooler.

4. Hang heavy insulating blankets in all south- and west-facing windows, at least while the sun is shining on them. The more you can prevent summer sun from directly shining into your house's rooms, the cooler they will be.

5. A cool shower before the afternoon nap or bedtime helps keep both grown-ups and children cool.

6. Drink lots of pure water or water with a little fruit juice added.

7. Arrange your work schedule as they do in hot desert countries: Take a siesta or stay inside quietly in your coolest room during the hottest afternoon hours. Make up for it by working in the evening, when the temperatures are comfortable, doing what in winter you would have done in the afternoon. Plan to do hard mental jobs in the morning and expect to have brain meltdown during the hot hours, compensated for by that nap or undemanding time. It's a simple physiological fact that we don't think and function as well under extreme heat.

[Excerpted from the "About Nonpolluting Energy Resources" section in Chapter 1, "Oddments"]

Lemonade

Citrus juice always taste best on a hot summer day, especially if it is freshly squeezed. To get the maximum juice from the fruit before squeezing, quickly heat the fruit in hot water for several minutes or roll to soften it.

ORANGEADE

Combine 2 tablespoons of sugar or other sweetener, 1-cup water, and the grated rind of 1 orange in a saucepan. Boil 5 minutes. Cool. Add 2 cups orange juice and 2 cups cold water. Serve chilled over ice.

LEMONADE

For each serving, mix 4 tablespoons lemon juice, 2 tablespoons sugar or other sweetener, and 1 glass ice water. For a batch, juice 5 lemons. Add 5 cups water and sweeten to taste. Serve with a slice of lemon in each glass. 

PINK LEMONADE

Add to a pint of lemonade prepared in the recipe listed above, 1 cup or less of strawberry, red raspberry, currant, or cranberry juice.

LIMEADE

For each glass use 3 tablespoons lime juice, fill with water, and sweeten to taste. Serve with a slice of lime in each glass. 

Hot Fudge Sauce

To go with my last post on homemade vanilla ice cream...

It's hard to beat an ice cream sundae on a hot, summer day. If you love to indulge in ice cream smothered in chocolate, nuts, whipped cream, coconut, fruit or candy, this hot fudge sauce will make your sundae even more delicious and satisfy your chocolate craving. I recommend using vanilla, chocolate, or coffee ice cream with this sauce only because they are my favorite ice cream flavors!

HOT FUDGE SAUCE

Mix 1 cup sugar, 1 cup water, 1 tablespoon cornstarch, 2 tablespoons of cocoa, 2 tablespoons of butter, and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla and cook over medium heat in a heavy pan until thick. Stir constantly (it will stick). When cool, store in a jar in a cool place. To reheat, place jar in hot water until it is heated. If you want it thicker, add just a bit more cornstarch. 

Homemade Vanilla Ice Cream

To celebrate the upcoming warm weather, I am anxious to make homemade vanilla ice cream so that I can put together ice cream sandwiches. Homemade vanilla ice cream is much better than store bought and it is quite fun to make. This would be a great recipe to make with a child because it is fun to shake the bag or turn the handle. If you are using an ice cream machine, it is even fun to watch the creamy mixture transform into a solid mass. Feel free to add fruit, chocolate chips, or nuts to this vanilla base once it has turned solid but not frozen.

VANILLA ICE CREAM

Mix 1 quart light cream, 1-1/2 tablespoons of vanilla, and 3/4 cup of sugar. First put the cream mixture into the freezer can, set the can in the freezer, adjust the top, and fill in around the can with ice and rock salt in layers. Use 3 parts of ice to 1 part of rock salt. Then turn the handle of the crank, slowly at first, then faster as it begins to freeze. This makes for a smoother ice cream. When you feel that it is becoming harder to turn, you can open it up and see if it is done. You can eat it at this point for a soft-serve ice cream or freeze it until it is solid for a harder ice cream.

ICE CREAM SANDWICHES

Place frozen ice cream between two pieces of devil's food cake or any two cookies to create a sandwich. Make your own paper covering or eat immediately. Enjoy!  

BBQ Seasonings

Even though the weather may not reflect the season, summer is almost here! The next few months will be jam packed with barbecues and picnics. No barbecue is complete without hamburgers or hot dogs. I am a fan of veggie burgers and veggie dogs layered with delicious homemade condiments.



BARBECUE SAUCE
1. Combine 2 tablespoons of brown sugar, 1/2-cup vinegar, 1/2-cup water, 1-teaspoon salt, 1 small chopped onion, 1/8-teaspoon chili powder, 1/4-teaspoon Tabasco sauce, 1/2-teaspoon mustard, and 1 can of tomato sauce.  
2. Mix well.

DIJON MUSTARD

1. Combine 1 large chopped onion, 3 minced cloves of garlic, and 2-cup dry white wine in a non-aluminum pan.
2. Cook on low heat for 10 minutes.
3. Then let steep for 15 minutes.
4. Strain and discard solids.
5. To your flavored liquid, now add 4 oz. dry mustard, 1/4-cup honey, 1-tablespoon plain-flavored cooking oil, and salt to taste.
6. Simmer again, stirring constantly, while you evaporate it until it's thick enough to spread.

KETCHUP

Combine equal parts of water, strong Japanese soy sauce, and molasses. Add fresh or ground ginger, coriander, and pepper. Mix well.

PEPPER RELISH

1. You'll need 3 quarts of chopped cucumbers, 3 cups of chopped sweet green peppers, 3 cups of chopped sweet red peppers, 1 cup chopped onion, 3/4 of cup canning or pickling salt, 4 cups ice, 8 cups water, 2 cups sugar, 4 teaspoons each of mustard seed, turmeric, whole allspice, and whole cloves, and 6 cups white vinegar (5%).
2. Add cucumbers, peppers, onions, salt, and ice to water.
3. Let stand for 4 hours.
4. Drain.
5. Re-cover vegetables with fresh ice water for another hour.
6. Add spices to sugar and vinegar.
7. Heat to boiling and pour mixture over vegetables.
8. Cover and refrigerate for 24 hours.
9. Heat mixture to boiling and fill hot half-pint or pint jars leaving 1/2-inch headspace.
10. Adjust lids and use conventional boiling-water processing.

Sweet Summer Delights

It looks like the Pacific Northwest is beginning to embrace the concept of summer a little bit (knock on wood), and I say we had all better take advantage of the glorious sunshine while we can! But in what way should we express our appreciation of this generous dose of Vitamin D? Carla Emery suggests homemade popsicles for a refreshing treat on a warm day—a favorite for both the young and old!

Homemade popsicles are great because they are “cheap, easy, and even more fun for the children than going to the store. Children like strong, sweet juices like grape and cranberry for popsicles—but when kids are hot anything will do,” even popsicles made from puddings or soda pop! You can buy do-it-yourself popsicle molds from Tupperware and Back to Basics (I actually have a small one from Target, and I’ve been using it all summer, even on the cooler days) or you can make your own from regular household items. Use small sturdy bowls or cans for containers—or even the ice cube tray in your freezer—and wooden sticks or toothpicks for handles.

Using whatever popsicle-making container you prefer, pour your favorite juice into the molds without filling completely, insert your handle, and freeze. (Extra tip: if your containers and handles are makeshift rather than store-bought, you might have trouble keeping your handles completely upright. If you allow your liquid to freeze partially before you insert your handle, you’ll have a more solid consistency to hold the handle up straight.) Obviously, freezing time will vary quite a bit depending on the size and shape of your molds and the temperature of your freezer, but don’t pull on the handles “until you’re sure the center of the popsicle is solidly frozen and you have loosened the sides by running hot water over the back of the mold. Otherwise they might pull out of the container prematurely, leaving a hole that it won’t freeze back into. You don’t have to unmold all the popsicles at once. Just loosen as many as you need. Refill the emptied units and return to the freezer.”

You can use any kind of fruit juice you like for your homemade popsicles (lemonade works great and is particularly refreshing on a warm day), but of course Carla Emery has a couple of recipes working from scratch.

Basic Fruit Popsicles

Puree 1 c. any kind of fruit or a mixture of fruit, and mix with 1 c. water. Pour into your ice cube tray. When they are starting to freeze, add a wooden stick or toothpick to each section.

Pudding Popsicles

Susan Staley was in Germany when she sent me this recipe. She said, “If your children love the Fudgsicle-type popsicle, you can easily make them. Just make up a batch of pudding and freeze it in your popsicle molds. They’re delicious and you can make different kinds besides chocolate. Butterscotch is very good. In fact, any flavor of pudding your children love hot, they’re bound to like cold in hot summer weather.”

Any Fruit Ice

You could juice pomegranates or barberries or red currants, or cook and strain quinces, or grate pineapple, or boil and pulp apples or rhubarb — whatever you have. Sweeten to taste, add lemon juice if the flavor needs it, and freeze.