As we all know, fruit is a great source of vitamins. Your children should eat fruit every day regardless of the season. We’ve prepared a few healthy and tasty fruit recipes for you and your little ones to enjoy. Of course, we’ve made sure to choose those that preserve the most vitamins within the fruit.
Uncooked fruit syrup
Uncooked fruit syrups have a strong fruity aroma and taste, they don’t contain any artificial colors or sweeteners and are strong enough to add flavor to water even if you add a small amount. The fruit in these syrups has not been cooked, so all of the fruit’s original vitamins and minerals are preserved in the syrup.
Ingredients:
- 1 kg of fruit
- 1,5 kg of sugar
- 20g of citric acid or 2 lemons
- sorbic acid for preservation
Instructions:
You can try this simple recipe with any kind of fruit. We’ve already tried to make strawberry and cherry syrup and they both turned out great.
Wash the fruit thoroughly and crush it. Small fruit, such as strawberries, raspberries or currants are easy to crush. If you’re working with cherries, you need to remove the pits before crushing them. Larger fruit, such as apples, pears, peaches or apricots must be cut into smaller pieces before you can work with them. If you have a kilogram of fruit, you’ll need 1,5 kilograms of sugar. Mix the sugar with the crushed fruit, add citric acid (or juice from two lemons) and allow it to sit until the sugar dissolves. Sift the fruit and pour the syrup into bottles.
If you’re only making a small batch of syrup and plan to consume it within a short period of time, you don’t need to preserve it. However, if you’re making a big batch and are planning to consume it during the entire year, you will need to add a bit of sorbic acid based on how much syrup you’re made (syrup made from 1 kg of fruit needs around 20g). Sorbic acid is the safest preservative out there and it will protect your syrup from mold.
If you’re planning to make a lot of syrup, never make batches bigger than 2 kg of fruit because it will take too long for the sugar to dissolve. Making a few separate smaller batches will speed up this process significantly. Never put, for example, 10 kg of fruit into a batch, else it will take a week for the sugar to dissolve. We’ve learned this lesson the hard way.
If you have the fruit you used for the syrup without large pits, you can cook it in a pot and use it to make great marmalade. Making marmalade from the fruit that was left is very fast because almost all of the water went into the syrup. You just need to cook the fruit until it starts to boil and then you can start filling up glasses.
Curd and fruit dessert
A combination of curds and fruit is very refreshing, especially in the summer. You can prepare a simple dessert that will make a great snack for your children.
Ingredients:
- 300g of any fruit – strawberries, cherries, apricots, peaches, etc.
- 1 vanilla pudding
- 250g of curd
- 300 ml of milk
- biscuits
- 1 tbsp of cocoa
- 3 tbsp of honey
Instructions:
Cook a thick pudding from the vanilla pudding package you’ve prepared and 300ml of milk. When the pudding cools down a bit, add curd into it and mix the whole thing with a hand-held mixer.
Put the biscuits into dessert bowls. Lightly mix the cocoa and honey with washed fruit and put the mix into the bowls on top of the biscuits. Pour your vanilla curd on top. You can sprinkle a little cocoa on top for effect.
Fresh cocktails
Fruit cocktails are very tasty and refreshing, especially in the summer days. They’re also full of vitamins and filling enough to replace a small meal.
Ingredients:
- 200g of fruit – this is up to your preference
- 1 banana
- 2tbsp of vanilla sugar
- 300ml of milk (or poppy milk)
- 1tbsp of finely chopped hazelnuts or almonds
Instructions:
As with any other cocktail – add all of the ingredients together into a container with high walls and mix them with a hand-held mixer.
You can use poppy milk instead of regular cow’s milk. You can easily prepare poppy milk by adding 300ml of boiled water to 2 tablespoons of poppy. Leave the mix during the night and then mix the poppy and water together with a hand-held mixer. If you use poppy milk, there may be traces of poppy in your cocktail. If you mind, you can simply use a sieve to separate them. Poppy milk is white and similar to cow’s milk but it’s richer in fiber and contains vitamins and minerals. It’s a great substitute for people who are lactose intolerant.
Enjoy!
