Tropical Popsicle

Tropical Popsicle. Breezy Freezy. Fruits Cahoots. These fruit pops required a rhyming name.

For the past week and a half, the Mad Scientist has been taking an inter-semester break, so he and Littlest have been hanging around the house quite a lot.  I love having my boys home. Usually, I am locked up in my office all day with exactly zero face to face interaction, but with Littlest and Mad Scientist around I get all kinds of attention.

For example, Littlest will crawl into the office, pull all the books off the shelf, and begin shrieking (pteradactyl style) at the precise moment that a client is calling to understand the details behind an analysis that I've put together for them.  Or the Mad Scientist will ask me to watch Littlest for a few minutes while he runs to Lowe's, and I will find my child laughing uncontrollably with his onsie drenched in (sweat? water? other?) and his face full of mud.

Maybe these aren't among the highest order of social interactions, but I love them nonetheless, because I love being with my family. I even love when the Mad Scientist comes inside complaining about the heat as if it is the weather's fault that he is all sweaty when he is the one who is outside working ridiculously hard to solve our drainage problem.

Do you want to know what else I love? I love that at the end of a long work day (for me), and a long day of home improvements (for the Mad Scientist), and a long day of ? (for Littlest), we all sat together (Norman Rockwell style but in dry fits) and enjoyed these Tropical Popsicles.

Tropical popsicles are the quintessential fruit pop.  The only ingredient in these bad boys is fruit (and water).  I can't quite nail down why, but there is something so purifying, so cleansing about eating a sweet (and the tiniest bit tart)  treat and knowing that you don't even have to trick yourself into thinking its healthy.  It's just pure, frozen refreshment on a stick.

The ingredients are as simple as can be. Tropical Fruit (for this batch I used mango and pineapples, but bananas, papaya and coconut are amazing too), and non tropical fruit (I used strawberries, but any berry or a sweet citrus would work well too). Cut, blend, freeze, enjoy.

Eating these felt indulgent and luxurious and detoxifying and cleansing all at once.  These pops made it easy for me to ignore the fact that Littlest ate more dirt than fruit, and to ignore the fact that we had no patio furniture (we sat on overturned 5 gallon buckets).  We were just a little family eating a little treat, and cooling off from the heat of the day.

I like memories like that.  I hope to have more of them, and I hope these Tropical popsicles help you to make memories too.

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Tropical Popsicle

by Hannah Rounds May-14-2014

Its frozen tropical fruits. Simple and refreshing.

Ingredients

• 1/4 Pineapple Pineapple- Diced
• 2 Mangos- Diced
• 1/4 Pound Strawberries- Diced
• 1/3 Cup Water

Instructions

1. Blend half of strawberry chunks, half of mango chunks, half of pineapple chunks, and water until smooth2. Fill molds 2/3 full with blended fruit3. Add small chunks of fruit to the mold until the mold is full4. Insert sticks, then freeze at least 5 hours5. Thaw using either the warm running water or the warm bath method. Either one takes 20-30 seconds and both work equally well for this type of ice pop.

Details

Prep time: 30 mins Cook time: 5 hour Total time: 5 hour 30 mins Yield: 6 Popsicles