Make Your Own Cure for the Winter Blues!

This past winter, I tried hard to limit our grocery store fruit purchases to US fruit. That meant a lot of citrus from Texas and a lot of apples from Washington, which overall, was fine with us. Then, it happened. An insidious interloper appeared on the grocery store shelves. Something so seemingly-wonderful, and yet so completely out of place that it caught not only my eye, but my son’s: watermelon in January.

He begged. He pleaded. He wheedled. He drove me nuts. He wanted that watermelon. I stuck to my guns, knowing that watermelon in January from Ecuador could not possibly taste as sweet as watermelon in August picked the day before and transported by hand to the market. Then we went to a friend’s house and saw, you guessed it, watermelon.

My friend reads this blog and teases me about the watermelon (especially because, months later, Gabriel STILL asks why I wouldn’t buy it for him) and she’s given my family a free pass to come eat non-local food at her house during what some may perceive as my latest experiment in dogmatism.

But this winter, I have the cure for those wintertime watermelon blues! In a bit of forward-thinking genius, I decided to spend a few hours this summer turning the perfectly ripe fruit of August into perfectly delicious sorbet syrups that I could freeze and make either into sorbet or popsicles this winter.

So next time those Ecuador melons rear their “bred for 5000 miles of travel, not flavor” heads, I’ll be prepared. So far, I’ve done strawberry, muskmelon, and, of course, watermelon. I’ve got quite a few more planned, but I’ll share the basic recipe:

2 cups fruit pulp
1/4 – 3/4 c sugar or honey, or a mix, to taste (quantity depends on the sweetness of the fruit, so I did none for muskmelon, 1/4 cup for watermelon, and 3/4 c for the strawberries)
Puree in the food processor and either chill, then pop it into the ice-cream machine or label and freeze for January!

Some of the recipes I have for sorbet call for additions like wine that I will add when it’s time to make the sorbet (no, I won’t be adding wine to the popsicle mix!). Others call for HFCS, which I have conveniently forgotten to add. I know this will make the sorbet more icy, but I think it will still be a yummy diversion mid-winter.