Mini food is fun food! Baked up in crispy, shredded potato crusts, and filled with fresh eggs, milk and organic spinach, these mini muffin tin creations turn healthy food into fun food for kids. Served warm or room temperature these little quiches make a delicious light meal, party appetizer, or a great addition to any lunchbox! (more…)
It’s summer! Across the country, state and county fairs are offering loads of delicious processed foods on sticks. Foods that kids love (and I hate to admit, some of us adults too). Today as my boys and I strolled through the brightly colored booths at the Ventura County Fair, we inhaled the decadence of fried fair treats, creating memories of summer. These are the memories we will eventually go back to on cold November afternoons, encouraging us to take out a box of frozen corn dogs in order to recapture the experience. Hey, why not? Frozen corn dogs are easy, inexpensive, delicious, and some brands are even made with healthy turkey dogs, right? But it’s what lies within the box, underneath the list of thirty seven, no thirty eight ingredients that should snap us back from our sweet memories of summer and encourage us to look for food outside of the box.
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that a a lot of kids out there like avocados. They are a healthy, nutrient rich fruit (yes they are a fruit) that are often passed off as a vegetable in sandwiches, salads, and of course, guacamole. Seeing as Cinco de Mayo is right around the corner, I realized those easy prepackaged containers of guacamole would soon be flying off the supermarket shelf. (more…)
Spring is here, and with it comes one of the most recognizable candy confections to grace the supermarket shelves…Marshmallow Peeps. Those little pastel colored puffs of artificial flavor fill many Easter baskets and young tummies each year. But perhaps it’s time to consider what those little bunnies and chicks are actually made of. As we discussed last week, it’s also important to recognize artificial colors and their suspected effect on children. The pink Marshmallow Peeps are colored with Red 3, which according to Ruth Winter, M.S. in her book A Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives, “in 1996…was found to be a cancer-causing additive and may contribute to breast cancer.” Apparently, according to the same book, the FDA has considered removing Red 3 as an optional food colorant, but has yet to do so. What are they waiting for? (more…)
Food dye. Well there’s the big red-blue-yellow and pink elephant in the room. Artificial food dyes are currently headliners on our food related news. A couple weeks ago Frito Lay announced they plan to give a more natural makeover to some of their snack products like Lay’s flavored Potato Chips, Tostitos, Multigrain SunChips and Rold Gold Pretzels. And a week later the FDA held hearings to evaluate a request to post warning labels on the labels of products containing these artificial colors. You can read three pertinent news articles on these topics here: (more…)
The answer is NO. Repeat after me, No nitrites, no nitrites, NO NITRITES!!! Okay, I just had a flash back to my old cheerleading days.
Turkey deli meat is one of those things that I never really thought too much about. It’s always been the lean deli protein that came sliced, smoked, honeyed or roasted and when piled on whole wheat bread with mustard and veggies became my healthy lunch. Or was it? During this Out of the Box Food journey I’ve been looking more carefully at everything, and that needed to include turkey. I tended to choose turkey over ham because it was supposed to be healthier, right? Well, I’m learning that it’s not just about the product itself, but how the product is cured and what might be added to it that makes the difference. (more…)
My kids have ALWAYS wanted Lunchables. They have no idea what they taste like, but they think the little compartmentalized container with the little squares of processed food product are enticing…I’m sure that’s what the company was hoping for. I’ll admit, I have tried to create homemade versions of the Lunchable by cutting deli meats and cheeses into little squares, buying individual containers and organizing the bite size morsels into their lunch boxes. But I have yet to get approval from the under seven set. They’re just “not cool, mom”. So therein lay my dilemma. I couldn’t possibly make a cool homemade Lunchable, and I sure wasn’t going to buy the prepackaged Lunchables. So there we were, my kids and I in a Lunchable stare down. Who’d blink first? (more…)
Cookies are such an easy treat. They can be packed in a lunch box, stuffed in a mouth or held in even the tiniest of hands. But why fill those little hands and mouths with hydrogenated oil and high fructose corn syrup when you can bake an easy, fresh, and delicious treat which, by the way, tastes even better warm with a tall glass of milk!
Packaged cookies are a convenience that I’d guess most (if not all) of us have purchased at one time or another. They must be a viable money maker based on the number of brands and varieties that fill nearly an entire supermarket aisle. Yet, when I compared the ingredients on packaged cookies to those we can make fresh…well, there is no comparison. (more…)
I’m not suggesting that what your about to read is about health food. It doesn’t follow a raw diet, vegetarian or vegan diet, or even a fresh-fruit-and-veggie diet. But we all know kids like fun food and I’m a believer that “Fun Food” does not have to be synonymous with “Junk Food”. If we make smart choices about the ingredients we use, we can make fun “kid food” without all the chemicals, food dyes, refined sugars and well…junk. (more…)
Granola bars stir up quite the controversy at our house. My kids want to bring them to school for snack, but a nut-free school means no granola bars with nuts of any sort. That rules out a lot of the granola bars on the market. Then when we look at what’s left and examine what ingredients are actually in the remaining granola bars things really start to get interesting. Let’s just say we’re left with…well, not much. (more…)