At some point over the last few months, I’ve grown a liking to fruit butters. I put them on bread all the time. The UC dining hall always has apple butter, and while I’ve had access to it for years, I only really started to eat it regularly. It’s really grown on me and it’s better than jelly/jam since it’s thicker, has more of an apple taste, and isn’t as sugary.
Then it dawned on me that there was more than just apple butter. Looking on the internet, I was able to find pumpkin butter, pear butter, peach butter, and even cherry butter. I bought some apple butter and pumpkin butter from Kroger without any HFCS, and found it to be much better than the stuff at the UC. Some of the stuff at the grocery store is cheaper and made in some factory with corn syrup and other added crap, but the stuff I got came from a farm in West Virginia. The pumpkin butter was like pumpkin pie, but not as sweet.
I wondered what the other butters tasted like. I searched everywhere and couldn’t find anything but apple butter and occasionally pumpkin butter. What’s more, the stuff seems to be “seasonal”. I could find apple butter easily in the fall, but it’s a rare item now. I never could figure out the seasonal food scam — it’s usually the best stuff but stores/people only make it during one sliver of the year (girl scout cookies, Reese’s PB eggs, pecan/pumpkin pies, pumpkin-flavored ice cream, sweet potato dishes, some beers). I finally broke down and ordered a trio of jars (cherry, pumpkin, and peach) from a national park website that offered the stuff.
It finally came in yesterday and I tried out the cherry — good stuff. It was like jam, but thicker. It’s also really different than the apple and pumpkin butters I’ve had.
The other thing that gets me is fruit juice. I signed up for a campus food co-op where local stuff is offered every week and you tell them what you want. Then you go and pick it up when it comes in. I ordered some “cherry” cider, which turned out to be apple juice with cherry concentrate and tasted in kind. I went to the grocery store and bought fruit juice labeled as “cherry”, but found cherries to be down the list after apples and grapes. It didn’t taste anything like cherries. I finally found pure cherry juice and blueberry juice at Trader Joe’s, but I’ve got to finish off the “cherry” cider first.
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