We're heading into the waning days of summer now. With just a couple of short weeks to go before Labor Day, it's time to start thinking about school lunches. While I don't have any little ones to send off to school quite yet, I know that lots of you do. When I spotted this Lunchbag Round-up over at Teensygreen, I knew it was just the sort of thing that Slashfood readers would be interested in.
They've taken the time to search for lunchboxes of all shapes and sizes in order to help you find the perfect lunch storage devise for your kids. Several of these boxes would be great for grown ups too, as you're never too old to bring your midday meal along with you.
On the days that I stay at work for lunch, I carry my meal in a combination of jars and reusable plastic containers, tucked snugly into a zippered, insulated bag in which someone once mailed me cheese. For those of you who often bring your lunch with you, what's your preferred way to transport your food?
When I was growing up, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was one of my very favorite books. Set in the very fictional town of Chewandswallow, the residents don't have to shop at grocery stores the way the rest of us do. Instead, all their food was delivered by the weather. Morning would start with a drizzle of hot coffee, followed by eggs, toast and bacon. Life was good in Chewandswallow, until the weather becomes unpredictable and the food that comes from the elements becomes life-threatening. Eventually the townsfolk are forced to leave (on rafts made from giant peanut butter sandwiches) and restart their lives in a city where the only thing that falls from the sky is rain and snow.
First published in 1982, Cloudy has been beloved to generations of young readers and now, according to our sister site Cinematical, it's coming to the big screen. The animated film is going to be altered quite significantly from the original book, but hamburgers and donuts will still rain from the sky and the city will still be blanketed by a pea soup fog at times, so that's good enough for me. I really look forward to seeing it when it comes out in 2010.
Are you concerned about your kids eating their eggs? The Egg Robot is here to help.
The Egg Robot comes with the robot suit and the spoon, but you have to provide the eggs, of course. It's a newish toy that claims to make eating eggs more fun for your kids, thus they will now eat their eggs (it's really nothing more than a fancied up egg cup). That's assuming you have trouble getting your kids to eat eggs, otherwise it's just a novelty item that'd hang around and clutter up your house.
I know I didn't like eggs when I was a kid, except hard cooked eggs. There wasn't very much my mom could do to convince me otherwise, but I don't remember that being such a big concern for her. Maybe you could put other foodstuff in the robot to make your child want to eat whatever it is, something a little more important, like vegetables. Do you think this is a good idea?
I don't have any children, but I like to think that I'd be a good mom if I did. I'd read to them, try to get them interested in many different areas, and most of all teach them about food. Of course I'd want to try and raise sophisticated eaters, but I'd also teach them about eating healthily.
There are lots of ways to go about doing that, but I think that healthy eating websites would be a good tool to have in the bag. As I don't have any kids, I have no idea what's out there, but this website was brought to my attention recently. Playnormous is an online community for parents and kids to learn about healthy eating. There are games and animations, as well as a blog in which the posts talk about basic web lingo.
I looked around Playnormous and played the Food Fury game. I have to say, the site is really cute, and, even though it's for kids, I had fun playing the game. If you have kids, check it out. It may be a fun way to help teach your kids to eat well.
The teen version of the show will focus on "teaching and testing" the kids to "see what it takes to become a junior Top Chef." The series will be eight episodes, but no word yet on when it will air.
The National Mango Board (did you even know there was such a thing?) is calling all aspiring chefs between the ages of 8 and 14, trying to find the next Rising Mango Star. They are asking kids to make videos of themselves (no longer than seven minutes) preparing a recipe that includes mango and upload it to YouTube (there's also an online form that you need to fill out as well).
The judges of the contest are Food Network's Ingrid Hoffmann, Chef Allen and Regina Ragone. The winner will get an opportunity to cook and appear along side Hoffmann on a television segment. What are you waiting for? Pull out those video cameras and start cooking!
Most of us are familiar with the Easy Bake Oven. I was never one of the lucky kids to have one in my personal toy arsenal, but millions of others were. However, did you know that there was another children's toy that used similar light bulb technology to bake pretzels?
Until this weekend, I had no idea that there was such a thing as a Pretzel Jetzel. However, during a late afternoon meander through the basement of a junk store in Wrightsville, PA, I stumbled across one. I was sorely tempted to buy it, but I am already bursting at the storage seams and so am trying to keep unnecessary (no matter how cool) purchases down to a minimum.
It looked pretty neat, though. It came with packets of pretzel mix that you combined with water and then formed on the conveyor belt. They cooked (via light bulb heat) as they moved through the little house and at the end, bingo, freshly baked pretzels. I haven't been able to find out much other information about the Pretzel Jetzel, it appears it was only produced for a short time during the mid-sixties (and that most people stopped using theirs when they ran out of the pretzel mix that came with the toy).
Did any of you have this toy? We'd love for you to share your memories of it in the comments section!
When I was growing up, we were a granola and Cheerios kind of family. Kix cereal was an occasional treat and we were allowed to pick out one sugar cereal a year (on our birthday). This didn't mean that we didn't beg for the other, less healthy cereals that we saw advertised to us during Saturday morning cartoons, but my mom was passionate about keeping brightly colored and sugared flakes, charms and balls out of our cereal bowls.
It seems like she was on to something, as according to a recent report, printed in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, the more heavily marketed a cereal is to children, the less healthy it is. Additionally, this same team of researchers at Yale University have found that the health claims made about childrens' cereals are often misleading and false.
According to the study's lead researcher, Dr. Marlene B. Schwartz, parents should seek out cereals that contains 4 grams of sugar per serving (about one teaspoon) or less and that they should aim for 4 grams of fiber per bowl of cereal.
When I was a kid, I hated buying lunches at school. They were never particularly tasty, you had to waste valuable socializing time waiting in the lunch line and I liked the attention I got for being the kid who brought "weird" combinations to school (like yogurt and granola).
However, I know that for some of my classmates, those lunches that I turned my nose up at were the best thing they had to eat all day. In recent years, many school districts have worked hard at making their lunch offerings increasingly delicious and healthy, to the point where they probably would have tempted a snot like me. Now, with rising food costs, school cafeterias are having to find ways to cut back in order to keep serving up healthy meals, especially since government subsidies for school meals aren't covering the costs.
Some districts are cutting staff in order to make ends meet and others are foregoing pricey items like the ever-popular baby carrots and replacing fresh veggies with frozen. This July, the Congressional committee that determines the federal reimbursement rate to school lunch programs will meet to decide the amount that schools will get for the following year. Schools are hoping that they take rising prices into account and give them the 12% to 15% bump they need to maintain their level of service and nutrition.
Think you can tell a Yodel from a Ho Ho from a Swiss Roll by sight alone? If so, you're a savvier snacker than we are. Take the quiz, then come back to brag (or sulk) in the comments.
Our colleague Neil Goldstein works up a powerful hunger while he's trekking through the wilds of Upstate New York. Follow him as he forages for wild edibles.
I don't know how old I was when I started having a fascination with wild foods, but I can point to a few family activities that sparked it. As far back as I remember we used to go pick apples every year at an orchard near Stone Ridge, New York. Always fun, except of course for the inevitable case of poison ivy that followed a few days later. The apples weren't wild, but still the idea of picking something from a tree, and eating it right there got to me.
Another major influence were the wild strawberries and blueberries we picked as kids. The strawberries grew near our home in Woodstock. There were several places where you could pick a dozen or two small wild strawberries quickly with little effort, but a short bike ride away was a meadow that my older brothers Lee and Paul called Sergeant's Field. You could pick a few quarts of the local delicacy there.
Know your fusilli from your farfalle? Campanelle from cavatelli? Put your pasta savvy to the test with this photo ID quiz, then come back and share your score.
And you thought the green-beret'd Girl Scouts and their cookies were enterprising little kids?
In Victorville, CA, the latest trend at schools is an underground sugar trade. With candy and other "bad" snacks banned from school campuses, kids are selling contraband Snickers and Twinkies right out of their backpacks.
According to Jim Nason, principal at Hook Junior High School in Victorville, it's become quite a lucrative business for the dealers. Kids bring things like candy bars, soda, and even energy drinks from home in their "sack lunch" and turn around and sell them for a healthy profit, with some kids walking around school with upwards of $40 in cash.
While I understand this is a bit of a problem for the schools and parents, I have to hand it to the kids -- at least we can count on them to be very good businesspeople when they grow up.
During the years when I was going to school in Walla Walla, there wasn't much in the way of good food in town. Our options were the standard fast food fare, some greasy diners and a few taco trucks scattered around town (it was before the food and wine revolution that they've had over the last few years). However, the taco trucks offered some really fantastic fare, making me forever a fan of fresh tortillas wrapped around spicy beef, chicken or pork.
What got me thinking about taco trucks was this post on Serious Eats by Matthew Amster-Burton, in which he takes his four-year-old daughter to Tacos El Asadero, Seattle's best known taco truck that actually serves their grub on a bus instead of from a truck window. He got her a lengua taco, which impressed me, because I don't know any other kids who would willingly eat tongue. Apparently it made an impression on the little Amster-Burton, because when it was all over, she asked for a taco truck to be parked in front of their house. Don't we all wish for that?
Okay kids, it's time to dish. I know that there have got to be bunches of you who have taco truck stories. Let's hear them!
Childhood obesity isn't just a US problem -- it's a global epidemic.
In Australia, children are so fat that they don't fit into their car seats (the source article calls them "booster seats"). Researchers in Melbourne found that of the children who meet the height requirement (i.e. are short enough to sit in a car seat), 40% of them are too heavy.
Yikes.
And what's even more alarming is that parents are putting their kids in the car anyway using the regular seatbelts, which could do more harm to kids than good. For now, Australian researchers are calling for bigger seats to accommodate the bigger children, but how about Australia, and the US, work on getting kids to a healthy weight that fits?
We're heading into the waning days of summer now. With just a couple of short weeks to go before Labor Day, it's time to start thinking about school lunches. While I don't have any little ones to send off to school quite yet, I know that lots of you do. When I spotted this Lunchbag Round-up over at Teensygreen, I knew it was just the sort of thing that Slashfood readers would be interested in. 
Are you concerned about your kids eating their eggs? The Egg Robot is here to help. 
Ok, the kids pictured may be a bit too young, but you get the picture, right? That's right, Bravo wants to expand on its top rated 
Childhood obesity isn't just a US problem -- it's a global epidemic.
Chocolate-stuffed bananas on the grill
Tyler Florence welcomes new daughter
Beware kids' menus!
