Refreshing Summer Recipes for All Ages

What if you could transform your summer cookouts with healthier, vibrant dishes that still capture the spirit of the season? Join us on Create Harmony as we explore creative and plant-friendly recipes that are perfect for your Fourth of July celebrations and beyond. Host Sally Burlington reminisces about Southern traditions like pig pickings, but with a twist towards lighter, more nutritious options. You'll discover delightful treats like fruit sparklers made from watermelon and blueberries, and patriotic yogurt bites that can bring a burst of color and health to your picnic table.

So tune in, celebrate the season, and let's make your summer not just delicious, but nourishing and joyful too.

To learn more, go to mycreateharmony.com

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

Welcome back to the Create Harmony podcast. So this is a podcast about savoring life's blessings and setting an intentional rhythm. Together, we learn how to use our imagination as a way of listening to God, and if you are looking for a place to raise your well-being, you can find it right here. If you need a place to refresh your life, you'll probably find a lot here that you love. In this place, we'll take a few minutes to celebrate everyday joys and remind ourselves to notice goodness all around us. Now I'm your host, sally Burlington, and this is episode 79. So this spring and summer, we've been talking about journeys and travel, and we been talking about journeys and travel and we've talked about that both literally and figuratively, and we've been doing that because we say that we want to set an intentional rhythm. But one of the other things we value here is finding ways to refresh your life, and today is going to be much more about refreshing. So we're going to hear an excerpt from one of our episodes from last summer where I shared some healthy-ish recipes I'm sort of a healthy-ish person that you might want to add into your July 4th celebrations. You may want to add these to anywhere you like this summer. You can add them to all of your cookouts and picnics and celebrations and use them more than one time. So we'll pop into this episode midstream but hope you'll find some refreshing ideas. So summertime, here we come. Now here in America, our next big summer thing is the Fourth of July, or our Independence Day, and this holiday gets celebrated in lots of different ways across our diverse land, but most of those ways revolve around some sort of outdoor celebration. It's around water or around being outside on a picnic, food, cookouts, barbecues. You get the idea Now.

Speaker 1: 2:07

When I was growing up, I grew up in the South, so we had a tradition. A few years in a row we had, we invited the whole neighborhood over to our yard for a pig picking. And if you don't, if you live in another part of the world and you aren't familiar with this concept, it's exactly what it sounds like. You get a whole pig, you put it over a large grill, or some people do it in a pit, you cook it for a very long period of time and the men sit around and wait for it to be cooked and, you know, talk and drink beer or whatever for a whole day usually, and then you chop the whole thing up and you eat it and you add in some delicious homemade sides and some desserts. Many of those sides involve mayonnaise and you add a keg of beer and you're all set. So that is a great way to celebrate and I have really fond memories of that wonderful pig picking experience.

Speaker 1: 3:00

But since I've become an adult, I'm really trying to lean in a more healthy-ish direction. So I've gathered together some lighter, more plant-friendly options for us today Less mayonnaise and pork and more plants. So when I was collecting up these ideas, what I was looking for, what I was sort of on the hunt for, were things that were simple, things that were colorful and fun and that could be enjoyed by all ages. So the first idea I found is called fruit sparklers and I thought this was super fun and it's really really easy to do. You just get a watermelon, a fresh watermelon, and you slice it up and you take you've got to have a star-shaped cookie cutter. So you get a star-shaped cookie cutter and you can decide your size. I think it works best with like a little bit smallish star-shaped cookie cutter and you cut out as many stars as you can from your slice of your watermelon and then you get a skewer like a wooden skewer and you fill it with blueberries I think you could use about eight or ten blueberries in a row and then you add your watermelon star to the end of the skewer and you've got your fruit sparkler. So I mean this could be made in just a few short minutes. You could make up a whole bunch of these and create a colorful tray. It's a healthy treat that adults will like and kids can enjoy. It's clean and neat. It's not super messy, so thought that was a great idea.

Speaker 1: 4:27

Now, along those same lines, I found something called patriotic yogurt bites. Now you're going to need an ice tray for this one. So if you have one that has star shaped ice cubes, that is even better. You get bonus points for that. But if you don't have that, if you just have the regular ice tray, that'll be fine. You can use that. So you'll dice up your strawberries and you can cut your blueberries if you want them to be smaller. But if you are going to cut your blueberries, you need to be sure and put the round part of the blueberry on the bottom of your ice tray, because that's what you want to show on the bottom of your little yogurt bite and then you put your fruit down on the bottom of your tray. You put that in first, so you can make one cube of strawberry, one cube of blueberry, or you can mix it up whichever way you like. Then you fill the top of all of your cubes with vanilla Greek yogurt and you freeze them for about two hours and then you can enjoy.

Speaker 1: 5:22

Now, one tip here is when you serve these, you probably want to put the bowl that you serve them in over a bowl of ice, because if not, it's going to get real melty and kind of messy. That's not going to be a very desirable item on your buffet menu. So you want to kind of keep that cold, so it stays frozen until people pop them in their mouths. And now the next idea is also a frozen treat and it's called a berry and coconut water popsicle. So you're going to need a popsicle mold here. So you can, you know, run to the store and get you a popsicle mold if you don't already have one. Choose your berries and cut them up. You can use raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, I think even blackberries would work here Place that down into your mold and then just pour your coconut water over the top. Again real simple, very easy, very healthy. You'll freeze that for a few hours and they'll be ready to enjoy at your 4th of July get-together for a few hours and they'll be ready to enjoy at your 4th of July get-together. So that's a really good, cool, refreshing idea for your cookout.

Speaker 1: 6:23

Now our last idea is something that I had posted about last summer and we're going to revisit it again since I thought it was such a fun and easy treat. So you take a strawberry, you slice that in half and then you add just a little dollop of cream cheese to eat to the sliced side of the berry. You put the berry on its back and you put a little cream cheese on the sliced side. Then you line the cream cheese with three little blueberries and it makes a colorful and bite-sized healthy treat. You could make a whole tray of these and take them to a cookout, so that might be fun for you. So hope you feel inspired by these cool and creative things to savor this summer. And if you wanted to try these later, if you wanted to have these same ideas beyond the 4th of July, you could substitute any kind of other fruit and make them in new ways. You could get real creative with how you mix it up with your coconut water, frozen things or with yogurt or whatever. That's the end of our segment from our previous episode and hopefully that you enjoyed hearing about some yummy things you can do for your summer cookouts.

Speaker 1: 7:30

So now for our closing. Today we're going to have a quick gratitude prayer together. You can go ahead now and sort of shift your mind into your prayer posture and let us pray Holy God. Thank you for freedom. Thank you for the freedom to choose how we live and what we focus on. Thank you for the changes in nature we see as our cycle unfolds, and thank you for helping us change, while you always stay the same. You steady us on our journeys. May it be so. I'm so glad you joined today and I really. What I really want for you is for you to find lives filled with peace and joy and happiness and hope. Hearing these words help you take one step, if not more, in that direction, and we'll be back next week with some more thoughts on that. So until next time, peace, peace.