Fruitable Juice Boxes

My daughter has had a problem with her thermos leaking. It's a two part problem: 1. she doesn't put the lid on tight enough and 2. she doesn't drink the juice at lunch time.

I had $6 in my checkbook this weekend when I used my debit card to buy an $8 bottle of medicine for her over the weekend so needless to say the budget is tight and my husband will be hanging on to that car registration renewal for another day or two to keep our checks from bouncing.

But school lunch at her school is extra nasty this month... and she wants to pack three days this week. So, I need to fix this thermos problem. I've already tried reducing the amount I put inside and she still "doesn't have enough time" to drink it.

Today I used a small water bottle. And I found $3 in my wallet so we went to Giant for juice boxes. Juicy Juice boxes were on sale 5/$10, so the cheapskate in me wanted those. But I noticed that the Adam and Eve juice boxes were 2/$5. I discovered a "fruitables," like a V8 Splash. They had three flavors, one was berry.

At 50 cents more a pack, that's 6 cents a juice box and child gets 10% of her vitamin A and 10% of her vitamin E. I wonder, is it worth it? They're only 66% juice versus 100 which leads me to ask, what's the other 34%? So I read the ingredients:

Adam and Eve Fruitables

• Apple Juice concentrate
• sweet potato
• butternut squash
• strawberry, raspberry and some other juice concentrate I can't read under the wrinkle in the plastic
• filtered water
• vegetable something (darn crinkled plastic)
• added vitamins

Once again, nutrition via processed foods. But if you're going to pick a juice box... 

Apple Butter

As soon as I dropped my husband off at his office, my daughter and I went to Wegmans. I hope to do an entry about our trip once I recuperate... But my daughter saw me throw cottage cheese in the cart and asked me if she could have cottage cheese and apple butter for breakfast. At the end cap at the end of the tea row, they had Little Barn specialty jams and among them was a jar of "no granular sugar added" apple butter. The jar was $2.99, when I'm fairly certain traditional apple butter is more in the $1.99 range. But I looked at the ingredients: apples, apple cider & cinnamon. That's it.

Neither she nor I tasted a difference, though I want to say that the apple flavor was more intense. It irks me that so many products made with fruit have no much sugar added to them. Like popsicles. Because fruit is naturally sweet, why all the sugar? And canned fruit packed in heavy syrup. I find that gross.

(Though sometimes I use that kind of fruit for my tarte tartin, and I simply use the syrup to make the sugar syrup without adding sugar.)

Okay, end of rant.