Strawberry Rosemary Yogurt Pops

The boiling wound down by the end of the week as the temperatures began to climb past forty during the day and the sap turned, the buddy off-flavor announcing itself in the last batch on Friday and signaling that the season is done. I packed up Saturday — the buckets washed and stacked under the sugarhouse overhang to dry, the spiles pulled and rinsed and stored in the labeled box, the pan emptied and scrubbed and cleaned with the wire brush, the firebox raked out and the ashes carried to the corner of the garden where they will fertilize the perennials. The work of closing down the sugarhouse takes about a day if a man is methodical about it, and I am methodical about it because the alternative is to pay for sloppiness next March, and I have learned over fifty years not to make my future self pay for my present self's laziness.

The total for the season was eight and three-quarter gallons, which is on the better side of average for a hundred-and-ten-tap operation, and which represents a successful year by any measure I care to apply. The syrup is in the storage room beside the sugarhouse, the cases stacked by grade and by date, the labels in my handwriting that has gotten slightly less legible in the past few years but that still does its job. I labeled the inventory in the spiral notebook I keep for sugarhouse records — a notebook started by my father in 1962 and continued by me since 1990 — and noted the temperatures and the dates and the gallons, the same kind of entry that has been made in that notebook for sixty-three years. I do not know what will happen to the notebook when I am done with it. I assume David will take it. I have not asked. I have not needed to.

March 15 came on Wednesday this year and I sent the envelope. The address is a P.O. Box in Washington and the check is the same amount it has been for thirty-four years, written by hand and sealed in the white business envelope I bought in a box of fifty in 1991 and that I am still working through, the way I work through anything I bought in bulk and have not yet finished. The envelope went into the post office mailbox at noon. The transaction has no other component. I do not write a note. I do not include any explanation. The check arrives. The check is cashed. I send another check the following March. This has happened thirty-four times. It will happen as many more times as I am able. The envelope, like the syrup, is one of the fixed points of the year.

Made a Sunday roast — beef chuck pot roast, slow-braised with carrots and onions and red wine and a sprig of rosemary from the kitchen window plant that has somehow survived the winter, finished with mashed potatoes and gravy from the pan drippings. The roast went into the oven at noon and came out at four, and I ate it at the kitchen table with the late-afternoon light coming in across the snow-bare lawn — the south side of the house where Helen's garden is now showing real ground for the first time, the perennials beginning to push their first green tips through the mulch. The light at this time of year, in late March in Vermont, is the most generous light of all the year, the color of it warmer than the winter sun and not yet as harsh as the summer noon, the angle low enough to come through the windows and lay across the floors and the table the way it laid in this kitchen when I was a child and my mother was at the stove and my father was at the table reading the paper. The light has not changed. The kitchen has changed slowly. The man at the table has changed too, but the light is the same, and the light is enough to make the man feel that the changes are not as large as they sometimes seem.

The rosemary I used in Sunday’s roast came from the small pot on the kitchen windowsill — the same plant that has sat in that spot through the dark months, surviving on what little light comes through the glass in January and February, and that I had not been entirely sure would make it. It made it. With the sugarhouse closed and the season tallied and the light now coming warm and low across the kitchen floor the way it did when I was young, it seemed right to let that plant do something cheerful for a change — something that belongs to the spring that is finally arriving rather than to the winter that has just let go.

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 5 minutes | Total Time: 4 hours 20 minutes (includes freezing) | Servings: 8

Ingredients

2 cups fresh strawberries, hulled and sliced
2 tablespoons honey
2 sprigs fresh rosemary
2 tablespoons water
2 cups plain whole-milk Greek yogurt
3 tablespoons maple syrup
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Pinch of fine salt

Instructions

Make the rosemary syrup. Combine the honey, water, and rosemary sprigs in a small saucepan over medium heat. Stir until the honey dissolves and the mixture just begins to simmer, about 3–4 minutes. Remove from heat and let steep for 10 minutes. Discard the rosemary sprigs.
Macerate the strawberries. Toss the sliced strawberries with the warm rosemary syrup in a bowl. Let sit for 10 minutes until the berries soften slightly and release their juices.
Mix the yogurt base. Whisk together the Greek yogurt, maple syrup, vanilla extract, and salt in a separate bowl until smooth and well combined.
Layer and fill the molds. Spoon a small amount of the strawberry mixture into the bottom of each ice pop mold. Add a layer of the yogurt mixture, then another spoonful of strawberries. Continue alternating until the molds are filled, leaving about 1/4 inch of space at the top.
Insert sticks and freeze. Place the pop sticks into the molds. Freeze for at least 4 hours, or overnight, until completely solid.
Unmold and serve. Run warm water briefly over the outside of each mold for 15–20 seconds to release the pops. Serve immediately or wrap individually and return to the freezer.

Nutrition (per serving)

Strawberry Rosemary Yogurt Pops — From the Window Plant That Made It Through