Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Healthy Snow Cones!

While on vacation, my always-on-top-of-the-trends niece brought her snow-cone maker. Turns out, snow cones are all the rage this summer for the older elementary set.

Needless to say, my kids were smitten with the icy concoctions. So, after we got home, we bought ourselves a $15 snow cone maker. Standing there in Target, the kids and I had visions all the snow cones we'd make. We'd impress their friends. We'd cool ourselves after bike rides in the summer sun. We'd use all the ice that our lame ice maker could generate. But then we turned to the syrup selection and our happy imaginings came to an abrupt halt.

I could not buy the brightly colored, artificially flavored corn-syrup called "Snow Cone Syrup."

"Kids," I told them, "We'll invent our our syrup. It won't be easy-- it will involve a lot of ice, a dose of creativity and the courage to taste."

They nodded. And we set to work. Here are the results of weeks of study:
  • Orange juice: Not too good. Too bland and the pulp gets caught on the ice. Plus, the color is unappealing.
  • Fresh squeezed lemon or lime with honey: Delicious, but too much work. The bottles lemon and lime juice tasted funny.
  • Olive juice: I refused to taste this one. The kids claim it was good, but then again they didn't actually eat much of it between hysterical bouts of laughter.
  • Juicy juice: So-so, but not very great.
  • Limeade concentrate, melted: Really good, but not very healthy. (Though better than the Snow Cone syrup.)
  • And finally, the winner: 100% fruit juice concentrate, melted: Fantastically good! We used cranberry-raspberry juice blend. But there's lots of flavors. You can keep the can of concentrate in the frig, ready to go. The juice plus the ice is basically the equivalent of a cup of juice. Not as healthy as a piece of real fruit of course, but still fairly healthy.
Hurray for snow cones.

1 comment:

sicitykitty said...

I can hardly wait to try it. Good for you because you took the time to find a healthy way to have a fruit flavored snow cone. Was it sweet enough? Wonder if one could just make a simple syrup then add a sttained fruit that is cooked first with perhaps a little bit of sugar cause it will help the juice release and taste better for this purpose. I will let you know, cause I am going to try it.If I think I come up with any thing good, I will post it.

Joan