At my house, we always have fruit with our breakfast. The cheapest and best tasting fruit is that which you’ve grown yourself like apples, or picked wild from the woods like raspberries or persimmons. This isn’t always possible in our hustle-bustle world though, so there are plenty of alternatives. Modern shipping and preservation methods have provided us with a myriad of low-cost, low-calorie fruits from which to choose.
Fresh fruit in season is usually a good buy, both economically and nutritionally. When kiwi fruits are 5/$1, I buy several dollars worth, and we have them sliced for breakfast. In the winter, when citrus fruits are cheap, we have grapefruit halves sprinkled with sugar substitute or drizzled with a little honey. In the fall apples go on sale. They can be sliced and stewed the night before or fried in a little non-stick spray for a wonderfully fragrant breakfast treat on a cool fall morning. Bananas are always inexpensive. They can top cereal or nestle with a few strawberries in a bowl with 1/4-cup of whole milk for a scrumptious spring time delicacy.
When fresh fruits are expensive, canned sugar-free fruits come into play. There are 5 main sugar-free fruits that can be purchased very cheaply. These are applesauce, peaches, pears, fruit cocktail and pineapple. They are usually canned in fruit juice or water; read the label to be sure. Other canned fruits quickly become too expensive for me to serve on a daily basis.
Frozen fruits are usually pretty expensive when compared with their fresh and canned counterparts. The only exceptions are frozen blueberries used judiciously in muffins, frozen strawberries and a fruit salad mixture. I am able to buy the latter two inexpensively in 4lb bags from a local warehouse store. The kids really enjoy frozen strawberries in winter, so I try to indulge them, especially when there is snow outside and the wind is howling. It brings a bit of springtime to the winter blahs.
Frozen fruit juice concentrates are excellent buys. I find apple juice, orange juice, grapefruit juice (my favorite), and purple grape juice are the least expensive at my stores. There are also exotic fruit flavors like raspberry-pear and cranberry-apple. These usually cost twice the amount of their more common cousins. I don’t buy fresh or refrigerated juices because they are generally priced far outside of my budget.
In the canned and bottled juice aisle, I like to buy low-calorie cranberry juice. At 30 calories per cupful, it is a calorie bargain. I look for in a store-brand to keep the price reasonable. Also, bottled apple juice often goes on sale very cheaply. Especially if your kids like apple juice, it is nice to keep a few bottles around for breakfast and cooking.
If you are watching every calorie and want a low calorie juice-type drink for breakfast, try low calorie Tang. It costs less than real juice from concentrate, although at $2.50 for 6 quarts, I still consider it pretty expensive. Each cup contains a full days supply of Vitamin C for only 5 calories. It is a fake food, so I wouldn’t drink it every day for the rest of my life. When the rest of breakfast is really high calorie though, and you really want a cool, refreshing juice to go along with it, Sugar-Free Tang can taste pretty good.
The last type of fruit we use for breakfast at my house is dried. Prunes, cranberries, apricots, raisins, dates and apples are all pretty easy to find and cost very little. Dried fruits are yummy added to hot cereal, granola, yogurt, or cold cereal and milk. I will sometimes soak dried fruits overnight and stew them in the morning. This plumps them up and give them a tender sweetness that you really have to taste to believe. Dried fruits keep a long time. I have a good supply in my pantry, so that even on days I can’t get to the store, we have a variety from which to choose for breakfast.
