Summer Sweetener: Watermelon Juice
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The Family Project Watermelon
Almost two weeks ago I bought a huge watermelon in order to make some fruit salad for a family gathering and only used not-quite a third of it for that. After finding room for it in the back of the fridge I finally hauled the watermelon out about a week later. It's been hot out and we love watermelon so we're finally getting toward the bottom of this thing.
Today I was making a mango-berry smoothie, just throwing together some fruit I had on hand that needed to be used up quickly and when I got to the point of adding some rice milk and reaching for the juice (we often add grape or cranberry juice to smoothies) I thought about the juice in the bottom of the watermelon. Why throw it out? It was fragrant and sweet, right?
After giving the fruit in the blender then the watermelon a careful sniff (yes, I combine food like Remy from the Pixar movie Ratatouille) I shrugged and threw in almost a cupful of the watermelon juice and hit the button.
The proof of how good this was is in the fact that I do have a picture of the watermelon but I couldn't get one of the smoothies. They disappeared too fast!
I was curious about how much sugar was in watermelon juice and compared it to sugar syrup and to the juice we normally use:
Watermelon juice: 14.76 g/Cup
Sugar syrup: 36.8 g/Cup
Old Orchard Cranberry Juice Blend (reconstituted): 29 g/Cup
Don't throw out the watermelon juice! It freezes really well, too.
I use watermelon and strawberries to make popsicles because, hey, kids like red ones, right?
Real Fruit vs. Jelly: Whole Foods for Sandwiches
There have been quite a few efforts to cut sugar at my house and still have yummy food. Something I did long ago was to ditch the sweetened peanut butter for all-natural peanut butter. It takes some stirring (I've even seen special peanut butter stirrers for this) but you can keep that to a minimum by storing the jar upside down in the fridge.
The next step has been to put our peanut butter with real fruit rather than processed fruit. Heck, it's not really a new idea, Elvis did it with his peanut butter and banana (and bacon?) sandwiches. That's not the favorite here, though. Nope, we go for peanut butter and apple!
Peanut butter and apple sandwiches, use almond butter for a variation
These Peanut-Butter Apple sandwiches are simple to make:
All-natural peanut butter
Thin slices, Gala apple
Cinnamon
Flaxseed meal (yep, crammed in some extra Omega-3)
Once you slice the apple kids can pretty much make these themselves. I thought mine would like the cinnamon but it wasn't a big hit. They don't mind the flaxseed meal. There are endless variations to this:
Crackers instead of bread
Just about any kind of fruit you can imagine with peanut butter; apples, raisins, dried fruit, peaches, bananas, etc.
Almond butter may be preferable if there is a peanut allergy unless the allergy is to all tree nuts then you'll have to get more creative. Believe it or not, turkey breast, apple, and a little cheddar or Swiss cheese (no peanut butter!) is really good, too.
Happy eating!
Glyph out.