"Is it three o'clock yet?"
Eli has asked me that every afternoon since the first week of summer break, usually around 2:20, and usually while standing in front of the freezer with his hand already on the handle. Three o'clock is snack time at our house, and in July it's the hardest hour of the day. Everyone has been inside since lunch because it's 101 degrees out, the boys are bored, Rosie is fresh from her nap and furious about it, and I'm trying to finish my few hours of preschool bookkeeping at the kitchen table.
What fixed the three o'clock hour this summer was the freezer. Bags of smoothie ingredients, frozen flat, and a steady supply of homemade popsicles. Both take less than an hour on a Sunday, and both cost a fraction of what I was spending on boxed fruit bars in June.
Smoothie packs
Each pack is a quart zip bag with:
- 1 banana, sliced
- 1 heaping cup frozen mixed berries
- A big handful of baby spinach
- 2 tablespoons old-fashioned oats
At three o'clock I dump a pack into the blender with 1 cup of milk and 1/2 cup of vanilla yogurt and blend until it's smooth. One pack makes three kid-size cups, or two cups and one very full sippy cup.
I make ten at a time. Bananas get sliced straight into the bags, berries go on top, then the spinach, then the oats. I press out the air, seal them and lay them flat on a half-sheet pan, two layers deep with parchment between. Once they're frozen solid, they stand up in a bin in the chest freezer like files in a drawer, and I can see at a glance how many afternoons I have left.
The batch of ten costs about $12.05: ten bananas for $1.27, a 3-pound bag of frozen mixed berries for $8.49, a bag of spinach for $1.99 and about 30 cents of oats. Add the milk and yogurt at blending time and each blender full comes to about $1.80, or 60 cents a cup.
Popsicles in two flavors
We have a ten-slot popsicle mold I bought for $9.97 a couple of summers ago, and it has paid for itself many times over. Two recipes are on repeat right now:
- Strawberry yogurt: 2 cups frozen strawberries, 2 cups vanilla yogurt and 2 tablespoons honey, blended. About $3.10 for ten, or 31 cents each.
- Watermelon lime: 4 cups of watermelon chunks (about a quarter of a $3.99 melon) and the juice of one lime, blended and strained. About $1.33 for ten, or 13 cents each.
The boxed fruit bars I had been buying work out to about 70 cents apiece. I'm not knocking them. They're good. But my kids can eat a box of six before I've finished putting the groceries away.
Popsicles take about six hours to freeze solid. To get them out, I run the outside of the mold under warm water for fifteen seconds, pull them, drop them into a gallon zip bag in the freezer and refill the mold right away. One mold in constant rotation gives us twenty popsicles a week without much thought.
What didn't work
The first batch of smoothie packs had twice as much spinach, and the smoothies came out swamp green. Eli took one look and said, "No, thank you," with the dignity of a man refusing a bribe. Wyatt drank his and Eli's. I cut the spinach back to a handful and went heavier on berries, and now they come out purple, which in Eli's world is a completely different drink.
My other mistake was filling the popsicle molds to the brim. The yogurt expanded a little as it froze and pushed two of the sticks up crooked, and one pop split in half on the way out. Now I leave about a quarter inch of room at the top.
Rosie, for the record, skips all of this. Her three o'clock snack is a small cup of frozen blueberries straight from the bag, eaten one at a time from her booster seat with great concentration, and her hands are blue up to the wrist by 3:10. Biscuit handles whatever rolls off the tray.
All told, ten smoothie packs and twenty popsicles cost $16.48, which covers about two weeks of three o'clocks.
