Good and Healthy Foods: Three Weird Ways To Get Some Fruit

Fruitabu Organic Smoooshed Fruit. These things are a recent obsession in our household, and it isn't just because of the way your mouth looks when you hold that "oo" sound for an extra "o." I remember growing up on Fruit Leather until I was a middle-schooler and the wretched Fruit Roll-Ups started coming out, then Fun Fruits, some sort of big rolled up tapeworm of fruit and then the Fruit Roll-Ups with the shapes cut out of them. Somehow the memory of how good Fruit Leather was faded away as the deformed gummy bears that are Fun Fruits took over my consciousness and embedded themselves in my molars.

Convenience snack foods can be a budget killer. My strongest memory of Fruit Roll-Ups besides picking them out of my teeth was as a sixth-grader relaxing at the home of my best friend when his father storm in and announced that he had talked the grocery store manager into giving him a case discount because his son ate so damned many Fruit Roll-Ups and they had better last him however many days equalled one per day or there would be hell to pay. We probably went through half a box of those things a day until they were gone. You just couldn't stop, they had no substance to them.

The flavor of Fruitabu Organic Smoooshed Fruit brings back the filling luxury of the original Fruit Leathers we used to eat when I was younger, before General Mills came along and squandered all the karma they earned by inventing Cheerios. They are softer than the slightly hardtack-like Fruit Leathers I remember from my childhood, and they have no added sugar, which is part of what makes them perfect for a three-year-old like Z. She gobbles 'em up. They make the tapeworm-style rollups too, but when you're talking no sugar added and totally organic, it seems a little less offensive.

A quick comparison of the ingredient lists of a typical box of Fruitabu "flats" and a typical box of Fruit Roll-Ups:

• Fruitabu: Organic apple puree concentrate, organic raspberry puree concentrate, organic lemon juice concentrate.
• Fruit Roll-Ups: Pears from concentrate, corn syrup, dried corn syrup, sugar, partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil, citric acid, sodium citrate, pectin, distilled monoglycerides, malic acid, vitamin C (ascorbic acid), acetylated mono and diglycerides, natural flavor, color (Red 40, Yellows 5&6, Blue 1, Red 3).

Turns out those chewy, hippy Fruit Leathers were made by the Stretch Island Fruit Company, and are still around. And guess what? They're the parent company of Fruitabu!

After getting hooked on a sample pack, we found a store that doesn't know how to manage their stocking schedules selling off Fruitabu flats for 11 cents apiece. We bought 140 of them. It felt almost as good as the day we walked into a greeting-card store on their last day of operation and bought $300 worth of greeting cards at 90% off. But the regular price is a perfectly reasonable 50 cents apiece on Amazon.com; that's 30 healthy, no-sugar-added, organic, last-minute snacks for your kids' lunches for $15!

Goody 2Chews. These are like little protein bars covered in chocolate, yogurt, or a sorta weird caramel topping. They are basically made of dates, raisins, almonds, and whey protein, and have 10 grams of protein per serving, a serving being a little bag that is more than a small child needs. Between the three people in our family each of us has a different favorite flavor. I like the yogurt the best, and I can't keep those other two straight. These sell on Amazon for $19 for 12 two-ounce bags. We open a bag and distribute them at a rate of one chew per person per day, as though we were wasting away in a lifeboat. But that's just us - you can eat the whole bag.

Peanut butter and strawberry sandwich. When jam is scarce, the tough get going, and the other day I invented this sandwich that is going to rule the world. Basically you slice up strawberries and apply as you would the banana in a peanut butter and banana sandwich. Some complain that the sandwiches are a bit drier than those with the more traditional jam, but I say they just aren't using enough strawberries. Which reminds me of a somewhat less healthy but oh-so-yummy-looking innovation I discovered today on Shiso Mama: PB&J cookies!