In the last couple of days I’ve taken to making vanilla Cokes with flavored coffee syrup and already it’s gotten out of hand. Since yesterday morning we’ve gone through nearly an entire half-liter bottle of the syrup. When I bought the bottle on Friday I expected that it would last a couple of weeks or more, considering that Olof and I each have just a cup or two of coffee most days, but we can drink a lot more Coke than we can coffee, which means that we’ve already had to buy a second bottle to have in reserve.

Yesterday evening when we bought the reserve bottle, Olof found himself unable to resist buying a new product we saw on a nearby shelf: saft concentrate for milk. For those not in the know, saft is the Swedish equivalent of Kool-Aid. Most often it comes as a concentrate that you mix with water to yield a fruity, sugary–though much less sugary its American counterpart–kids’ drink. For the most part it’s quite good, and I’d venture a guess to say that adults drink nearly as much of it as kids do (that’s true in our house, at any rate).

Anyway, this new product looks just like regular saft concentrate, but it’s meant to be mixed with milk. It comes in three flavors: strawberry, raspberry, and banana. Over my strenuous objections, Olof bought a bottle of the raspberry flavor and he mixed it up for the kids as soon as we got home. They seemed to like it well enough, but I was less enthusiastic. Lest anyone think to suggest otherwise, the result is nothing at all like the strawberry milk we mix up from powder back in the States. A glass of the prepared saft is purported to contain 10% fruit juice, and as far as I’m concerned fruit juice belongs nowhere near a glass of milk.