Food

Peas of Mind is a San Francisco company started by a mom who despaired of finding healthier snack (read: junk) food for her family. The result? Found in the frozen food aisles of Whole Foods and Targets nationwide. Peas of Mind offers Puffets, hockey-pucks of rice, pasta, and vegetables, Veggie Wedges, French fries made out of things other than potatoes, and new Peas of Pie, with broccoli and carrots kneaded into the crust.

The vegetable content is not that dazzling really: 1.5 vegetable servings for pies that supposedly serve 3. Considering that most moms think of “sauce” as the vegetable in a pizza, a tiny bit more vegetable content isn’t that thrilling. However, after buying a Peas of Pie cheese pizza at a local Whole Foods store and giving it a try, I’d have to say, it’s pretty good. If you didn’t know to look for them, you’d never see the veg-flecks, and the crust is tender and well-flavored, the sauce tangy but not spicy. I’ll buy it again.

Have you been buying applesauce and other fruit in squeeze-packs for your baby or your kids’ lunches? They sure are convenient! But evil. The squeeze packs are both made from non-sustainable materials (namely, plastic made from petrochemicals) and non-recyclable after use. Kind of a burden on the ol’ landfill just so you can give it to him without a spoon, huh?

But there is a reusable alternative. Beaba Babypote is like a soft silicone version of those packs. You put purees or mashes in the wide-mouthed top of the jar, screw on the top, and baby sucks them out. Yes, you’ll have to collect and wash it at the end. But isn’t two minutes of your time ladling in pre-made applesauce, yogurt, or your own purees easier than that convenient squeeze pack enduring in a landfill for thousands of years?

Beaba Babypote, $15

Talk about disguising vegetables: the Organic Chocolate Dream Greens bars by natural snack food maker Betty Lou each disguises carrot, kale, broccoli sprouts, and spinach underneath a layer of dairy-free chocolate. Word is that the vegetables are undetectable, buried as they are beneath chocolate and mixed with dates, raisins, and bananas. Hey, it probably works better to throw one of these babies in your kid’s lunch than to try to hide that stuff in a smoothie.

There are three other flavors of Betty Lou’s Just Great Stuff bars. The other we find intriguing: The Organic Fruit and Veggie Bar, which conceals a half serving of fruit and a half serving of vegetables within its chocolate shell.

Just Great Stuff Bars, $26 for a box of 12

Kids can learn through song, through drama, through dance. Why not learn through gum and candy? Shoppers at Whole Foods and other natural foods stores may already be familiar with Glee Gum, made with sustainably sourced chicle. Glee carries its environmental aim a few steps further with the Make Your Own Kits, fascinating little candy factories in a box.

Each kit is aimed at teaching kids about where ingredients come from. The cocoa butter in the Make Your Own Chocolate kit? It’s from Costa Rica. The chicle in the Make Your Own Gum kit? Sourced from the rainforest, which, by the way, is endangered. The thickening agent for the gummies the Make Your Own Gummies kit makes? Carrageenan, made by boiling seaweed from the ocean.

While making their own treats, kids will also learn about measurements, chemistry, nutrition, and environmental issues. A lesson that comes with a treat at the end, pretty sweet.

Make Your Own kits, $13 each

You can always tell when a kids’ recipe writer doesn’t have any kids. No, most children won’t give cold soup a try. No, things on a bed of spinach probably won’t go over. No, they don’t want the brown rice, the mashed cauliflower, the coq au vin.

In contrast, the recipes of blogger Lindsay Weiss always sound like things my family will eat, and like. They also sound like things that aren’t too hard to make, but that I’ve never made before: pumpkin muffins with cream cheese inside, that’d be so easy to pack in a lunchbox. Slow-roasted strawberry cupcakes, what a great way to use up the dodgy berries at the end of a flat. A red-white-and-blue drink for the kiddies, so perfect for Fourth of July.

Weiss usually sticks to sweets; I’d love to see what she could do to savories. But in the meantime, I look forward to her weekly recipe posts, always an aperitif that makes me want to get in the kitchen.

Man, it took forever for my daughter to figure out the difference between sippy cups and the kind of plastic straw-cups we’d be served at restaurants. She was always turning the restaurant cups over and dumping iced tea all over herself, or timidly sipping at the sippy cup “straw,” only to wail when nothing came out.

Looks like we could have used a Lollacup. The innovatively designed (and darned cute) cup features a straw that’s weighted at the bottom, so no matter what angle baby holds it at, a suck brings something up. The handles are big, smooth, and easy to grab for little ones, yet twist off easily for bigger kids worried about drinking out of something “babyish.” And the cup doesn’t have into little tiny valves in it to get filled with brown gunk you swipe at halfheartedly with a toothpick.

BPA-free and made in America, too? Hey, that’s a pretty cool cup.

Lollacup, $18

If you’ve ever found yourself with a knife, a bunch of same-sized cakes, and a burning desire to create one of those towering, whimsical “teetering pile of cake” cakes, you quickly realized that what looks slapdash and easy is actually extremely difficult to pull off. In fact, no one but a professional should attempt a topsy turvy or Mad Hatter cake—unless you come prepared with the proper tool.

Which is Petal Crafts’ Topsy Turvy Cake Pans. These pans are perfectly sized and proportioned to be stacked after baking. The pile looks like it’s just about to fall over. But it’s not!

Warning: What you bake still won’t look like the picture on the website, unless you have a lot of decorating experience, or a dab hand with fondant (a stiff icing that comes in a roll and is wrapped around the cake, giving a smooth appearance, rather than being applied like frosting). Luckily, kids are not picky when it comes to cake. Give it a coat of buttercream, decorate with candies, and they’ll be happy.

Topsy Turvy Cake Pans, $90

It’s no secret that we’re an unhealthy land and children in this country continue to suffer the consequences. In 2008 Jessica Seinfeld showed us how to hide healthy ingredients in kid-friendly foods to help boost their daily intake of key nutrients with her book Deceptively Delicious.

She has found her way back to the kitchen to provide healthy and satisfying recipes for the whole family. Double Delicious!: Good, Simple Food for Busy, Complicated Lives provides guidance and inspiration to busy families who want to make their meals both nutritional and appealing.

The book includes an aisle by aisle guide to making better decisions at the grocery store to boost the nutrients in our daily food. “When faced with hundreds of products on the supermarket shelves - many outright unhealthy and some masquerading as healthy - smart shopping becomes almost like a search-and-rescue mission.” She enlists the help of Lisa Sasson, a nutritionist in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, to develop shopping guidelines that are easy to understand.

She provides many inventive recipes including these that we can’t wait to try: Salmon Burgers, Creamy Whole-Grain Risotto, Scrambled Egg Muffins, Caesar Dressing, and Doughnut Cookies. Recipes are complete with nutritional information, estimated preparation times and nutritionist Joy Bauer contributes helpful tips throughout the book.

Start with the Chicken Cannelloni and Frozen Banana Pops, your family might actually thank you.

Available at Amazon.com

Stores abound with heavy-bottomed bowls, or those equipped with suction cups, which, presumably, kids can’t get off the table to spill. A few problems with that: Yes, they can (don’t know too many toddlers whose busy fingers can’t pick apart a suction cup’s seal in a few seconds), and those suction cups on the bottom make the bowls awkward to hold when you’re trying to finesse mushy peas into a wandering little mouth.

Loopa’s cool Gyroscopic Toddler Bowls, though admittedly impossible to stack in a kitchen pantry, has a literally space-age design that eliminates spilling. The gyroscopic (seen Lawnmower Man? yeah, like that) design has a heavy central bowl surrounded by two counter-rings. The outer blue one is meant for the child to grab and carry. The inner yellow ring is what keeps the bowl from spilling. No matter which way you tip the whole apparatus, the bowl returns to upright stasis.

Look, Mom! I’m eating cereal on the couch!

Loopa Gyroscopic Toddler Bowls, $9.99

What do you feed a kid with diarrhea or upset stomach? That’s Mom 101, right? Bananas, rice, apples, toast. That’s easy to do when you’re sitting around the house, but if you’re on the move, not so much. No kid’s going to eat a baggie of cold rice or toast. What you want instead is Organic B.R.A.T., a creamy non-dairy blend of brown rice milk, apple and banana purees, and added vitamins.

It’s sort of like a souped-up, healthier version of Gatorade. There’s no added sugar, no neon coloring, and no casein, corn, or soy (for the sensitive). The drinks have a chocolate-milk consistency, and were adored by my small panel of kid tasters, who particularly liked the chocolate honey flavor. Easy to drink, easy on the stomach; not a bad thing to have around when your kid catches a bug. Don’t like chocolate? There’s also vanilla, cinnamon toast, and “original” (kind of fruity) flavors.

Organic B.R.A.T. is available online through Amazon.com or at Safeway, Whole Foods, Wegman’s, and Shaw’s, among other chains.