Pretty-in-Pink Popsicles

My first real recipe on the blog!  This was inspired by a couple things.  (1) Leftover watermelon from last week’s hot dog extravaganza, (2) Summer’s memory of making watermelon-lime popsicles with her mom, and (3) Dreamsicle-inspired orange and vanilla yogurt popsicles from  Zoom Yummy. 

In preparation for the move, I have been trying to get rid of stuff so I was planning to make these popsicles in some Dixie cups using forks as sticks.  But then I saw these adorable popsicle molds on sale at the grocery store – how could I resist?  So I came home and made these pretty pink popsicles!  The yogurt gives them a slightly softer consistency than an all-fruit juice popsicle and when you bite into them you get large shards of ice that make me happy (although Geoff finds them weird).  Anyway, they are yummy - look:

These popsicles are probably more on the grown-up spectrum.  The favorite popsicle around our house are the Edy’s All Fruit Lime Bars which are pretty tart so these watermelon-lemon popsicles are as well.  Less lemon juice (or none at all) may make them more to your liking if you are used to a sweeter popsicle.

Pretty-in-Pink Popsicles
Makes about 18 in my molds

4 ½ c. watermelon juice
18 oz. lemon yogurt
2 lemons, juice and zest.

1.    Place chunks from about half of a seedless watermelon in the food processor and blend until smooth. 
2.    Pour into strainer and push through as much of the pulp as possible with a rubber spatula.  This left me with about 4 ½ cups of juice but if it a little more or less, don’t worry.
3.    Whisk in yogurt, lemon juice, and zest.
4.    Fill molds to fill line (don’t overfill, it will make a mess!) and freeze.
5.    If you have to freeze in multiple batches, be sure to stir the mix thoroughly before pouring as the watermelon pulp settles.

The Yarn Stash

I mentioned recently that one of my goals for this year is to use up all of my yarn.  That may not sound like a big deal to most of you (although those of you who knit – or live with me – know how quickly it piles up), but it turns out I have about 15 pounds of yarn.  How do I know that?  I weighed it all during the World Cup final.

I realized that the only way I could use up the yarn was to figure out what I had.  Since the majority of my yarn is partial skeins left-over from other projects and I wanted to know how much yardage I had, I figured the best way was to weigh it.  Each skein lists both the total weight and the total yardage so it is a simple ratio to figure out how many yards I have.  I made this table of the yarn, weight, color, and yardage in Excel by the end of the first half.

During the second half, I compared my “to knit” list to the yardage I have and came up with a plan.  I love OneNote which came with my Microsoft Office package for this sort of thing.  I have a page with small pictures and links to each pattern.  Now that I have a plan, all I have to do is knit my way through each of these 20 or so projects (ha!).

So you can track my progress, I added my yarn stash to the sidebar at right.  I’ll cross off yarn as I knit it up – but don’t expect to see anything done before I defend on August 4th!


Oh, and congrats to Spain - that was a beautiful goal!  I was cheering for the Oranje, but only because I wanted tiny new Oranje fan Penny to get to see her team win when she was 10 days old.  Spain played a great game.

America's Past Time

We had a great weekend with our friends Summer and Joerg who came to visit.  We took them to super-rural PA for some local, organic food and microbrews.  We had a bunch of friends over for some grilling and made Sonoran hot dogs, Chicago-Style dogs, and Hawaiian dogs.  All yummy.  We even made it to two baseball games and saw some crazy cube-shaped fireworks:

Sadly for the players, the eyeball races are always my favorite part of the game:




I hope you all had a fantastic Fourth and enjoyed the long weekend! Back to intense dissertating tomorrow.