Paletas de Melon

It is finally melon season at Happy Boy Farms and the customers are snatching them up left and right, so yesterday James was only able to bring home a single cantaloupe, which of all melons is his least favorite. But to me its musky sweet smell spells hot summer days wandering through cobblestone streets.

When I lived in Mexico I had a very routine life. As usual, most of my routine revolved around food. I didn't have a lot of money so I ate mostly at home, which as most single people know, it can get pretty hard to motivate oneself to eat healthy, much less eat at all, when it's just yourself you're cooking for. Yet I persisted and to start my day off right I would have coffee and granola with yogurt. By lunchtime I'd be prepping a salad. Since it's so hot in Mexico it is hard to have a lot of fresh produce. The heads of lettuce I would find in the grocery store were always wilty, but I would buy them anyway and crunch up my salad with cabbage, carrot, and pepper. I typically added canned tuna fish dressed up with lime, olive oil and a bit of red onion to my salad. I spent my afternoons opening and closing the fridge to discover that, yes, it still only had salad fixings and maybe a stack of tortillas.

Eventually my hunger drove me down the hill to town. One thing that I looked forward to (and still do when I get to visit) was my daily popsicle, called a paleta in spanish and only one dollar! The best friggin' dollar you ever spent. In Mexico the paleta is an art form and in practically every city you can find a paleteria, where there are paletas of most any flavor you can imagine. Hibiscus, guava, pineapple, pistachio, strawberry, yogurt...but my favorite of them all was melon. Melon, pronounced meh-lone. So refreshing, so cold and sweet, with small bits of fruit mixed in before frozen. I relished that popsicle. Only two other treats conjure up such exquisite, rhapsodic memories of my time in Mexico--palomitas con salsa (that's popcorn with Tapatio salsa drizzled over it) and adobada tacos. Deee-licious!

So when James presented the scorned cantaloupe, I knew exactly what I would be using that melon for: paletas de melon!

The possibilities for popsicles are endless when you really think about it. All you need is fruit, water, a blender, and a popsicle mold or an ice tray and sticks.

For these, I used one small cantaloupe, which made about 2 cups of puree, plus the reserved 1/4 of the melon I chopped into small pieces to mix in at the end. I added the juice of a lime for fun, but if you wanted you could just add about four tablespoons of water to thin it out before adding the melon chunks and pouring it into the molds. Depending on your freezer you could be in Mexico in about two hours.