Fruit Juice Pops — Capturing the First Strawberries Before the Season Runs Away

The first strawberries of the year came in Saturday morning, a small quart of the earliest berries from the south end of the patch where the drainage is best and the heat builds first. I sat on the porch step and ate them one at a time, still warm from the vine, not yet the volume or depth of flavor that the main harvest in June will have, but present in a way that no other fruit in the garden is on first arrival. The strawberry is the season's first sweet thing and it earns the attention it gets.

The memorial garden is at peak spring. The peonies are in full bud — three of them, all pink, the buds fat and heavy on their stems, the ants working them the way ants always work peony buds in late May, unlocking the petals from whatever botanical necessity requires them. The iris are blooming, the tall bearded ones in purple and yellow that Helen would have called proper iris as opposed to the Siberian ones she considered fussy. The climbing rose has set its first buds on the new canes it put out last year. The Japanese maple is fully leafed in its spring red-green. Standing at the edge of the garden on a warm afternoon with the peony fragrance reaching me on the breeze, I thought: this is exactly what it was supposed to be. This is it.

I wrote a post for the one-year anniversary of the memorial garden, May fifteenth, and published it that day with photographs of each plant at its current state and the brief account of the planting day: Carol with the Japanese maple, the peonies in their newspaper wrapping, Teddy's text from school when I told him. The post was shorter than I expected it to be. What needed saying was shorter than I thought. Sometimes a year of tending a thing is the whole statement and the words are just pointing at it.

Bill and I have been exchanging photographs of our respective spring gardens over email this week — his raised beds in coastal Maine, my rows on the Vermont hillside. The scale is different and the soil is different and the things we grow are almost entirely the same. This seems right to me. Two New England kitchen gardeners in their seventies, on opposite sides of the White Mountains, growing peas and asparagus and garlic and rhubarb and marking the same seasons by the same plants. The shared calendar matters.

That first quart of strawberries on Saturday morning was too good to let pass without doing something beyond eating them one at a time on the porch step — which is exactly what most of them deserved. But I held back a cup and a half and ran them through the blender with a little lemon and honey, and by afternoon I had a tray of pops in the freezer. There is something satisfying about that act: the season arrives, and instead of watching it move through your hands, you catch a small piece of it and put it away. Helen would have approved. She believed in not letting good things go to waste, and she also believed the freezer was a form of optimism.

Fruit Juice Pops

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 0 minutes | Total Time: 4 hours 10 minutes (includes freezing) | Servings: 8 pops

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups fresh strawberries, hulled and halved
• 1 cup 100% orange juice
• 1/2 cup unsweetened pineapple juice
• 2 tablespoons honey or pure maple syrup
• 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
• 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract (optional)

Instructions

1. Blend the fruit. Combine the strawberries, orange juice, pineapple juice, honey, and lemon juice in a blender. Blend on high until completely smooth, about 60 seconds. Taste and adjust sweetness if needed.
2. Strain if desired. For a smoother pop, pour the blended mixture through a fine-mesh strainer into a large measuring cup or pitcher, pressing gently with a spoon. Skip this step if you prefer more texture.
3. Fill the molds. Pour the mixture evenly into 8 standard ice pop molds, leaving about 1/4 inch of space at the top to allow for expansion during freezing.
4. Insert sticks and freeze. Place the lids on the molds and insert the sticks. Set the molds on a level surface in the freezer and freeze until completely solid, at least 4 hours or overnight.
5. Unmold and serve. To release the pops, run warm water over the outside of the molds for 10 to 15 seconds. Gently pull the sticks upward to slide each pop free. Serve immediately or wrap individually in plastic wrap and return to the freezer for up to 2 weeks.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 52 | Protein: 0g | Fat: 0g | Carbs: 13g | Fiber: 1g | Sodium: 2mg