Kelsey Banfield, blogger of the popular Naptime Chef, shares her favorite tricks of the brown-bagging trade:
 

To keep things interesting, I’ve started changing up the shape of my daughter's sandwiches and fruits by cutting them with my favorite new kitchen tool, the Lunch Punch. These awesome sandwich cutters come in cool shapes, like puzzle pieces and various animals. They also can be used for shaping grilled cheeses, cookies, Jello, and practically anything else you can imagine. No matter the variety of sandwich I make (her current favorite is ham and cheese), my daughter loves assembling the puzzle I pack for her. Then she eats the pieces one by one. She also enjoys playing with the animal shapes and giving them names.

If you can’t find the Lunch Punch nearby, you can easily use a regular sturdy cookie cutter instead. Once I even used her Lunch Punch to “shape” a pile of sticky rice. She loved it and ate every last grain. While I’m not one to sneak food into her diet, I don’t mind making her meals more fun. I’ll even admit that I enjoy it, too.

The Naptime Chef’s Favorite Sandwich Combinations (always served on whole-wheat bread):

Peanut butter with apricot jelly
Grape jelly with cream cheese
Sliced ham with swiss and honey mustard
Sliced avocado with swiss
Peanut butter with nutella (for a treat!)

For whatever reason, I find it psychologically challenging to pull out the clunky salad spinner to wash my greens. These produce bags from baggu have given me another option. You have to rinse the greens in a bowl first, but to dry, just shove them in the sack and have your kid fling it around as fast as she can. Who knew my 5-year-old could have so much fun with salad?

Lexy Schmertz, Contributing Editor

As I mentioned yesterday, after trying all the pricey juice programs out there, I've come to love my juicer. I love experimenting with different fruits and vegetables until I find the right juice cocktail. I love how fresh the house smells after I make the juice. And I love how my kids groan at the green juice and squeal at the fruit juice. 

The best part is that I don't have the cost or the hassle of a signing up for a multiday juice program or detox to have fresh, homemade juice. Making your own costs about half as much as a juice program-- juice detoxes average around $10 to $12 a juice. I make a pitcher of juice, which is about three glasses, for approximately $15 to $18, or $5 to $6 a drink. Plus, I can control the ingredients (for example, I hate celery in my juice) and the quality (I know that I'm using the freshest organic ingredients).

Here are three of my faves:

Green Juice
Spinach, parsley, cucumber, green apple (add a large carrot for extra sweetness)

Vegetable Juice
Beets, carrots, green apple, ginger

Sneaky Fruit Juice (my kids love it!)
Pineapple, banana, strawberries-- and spinach! (add blueberries if you're worried about the color)

Adriana Velez, What I Made for Dinner

Who is my favorite kitchen assistant? My iPhone, of course! Here are my favorite food-related iPhone applications.

Ever since my visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium a couple of years ago, I've been carrying around one of their pocket Seafood Watch Program Guides. The guide uses safety and sustainability criteria to recommend--or not recommend--eating various fish. Handy when you're at the fish market or a restaurant.

Now there is a national guide, a sushi guide, and six regional guides you can download. Better yet, you can upload the latest online pocket guide for your mobile device or find the iPhone app on iTunes. Within each guide, fish are listed in alphabetical order as "best choice," "good alternative," or "avoid." Click on the fish and you'll get an image of fish and details. All the guides are free.

But what if octopus is on the menu? It's not on the Seafood Watch guide (yet) but it is on Safe Seafood! This guide lists over 100 different seafood alternatives, with images, descriptions, and rating for population health, contaminant levels, and environmental impact.

You're at the grocery store, wondering whether to shell out extra for organic produce without straining your budget. How do you decide? With Environmental Working Group's Shopper's Guide to Pesticides. The small guide lists the "dirty dozen," produce that tends to contain the highest amounts of pesticides when grown conventionally, and the "clean 15," produce with the least amount of pesticides.

Is local corn in season yet? Ask Enjoymentland's Locavore. The app finds your location and directs you to produce currently in season and soon to be in season and to nearby farmers' markets. It also has links to Wikipedia entries and Epicurious recipes.

Now that you're loaded with safe, sustainable seafood and locally grown produce, it's time to cook. But what if you want to convert metric measurements to standard, or double a recipe? Kitchen Calculator converts volume, weight, distance, and temperature units.

Adriana Velez, Contributor

Memorial Day weekend is here, and many of us will be releasing our grills from their winter hibernation. In searching for new (to me) barbecue options, I keep coming across this idea: beer-can chicken. To believe the evangelists, apparently stuffing an open can of beer into the cavity of a chicken and grilling the bird upright is the pathway to poultry nirvana. The beer keeps the meat moist, and depending on the brew, the beer may also add delicious flavor. (Bonus: My 5-year-old son will get a huge kick out of it.)

The March/April issue of Cooks Illustrated has a recipe for glazed roast chicken using this technique indoors. You may want to adapt this recipe if cooking with canned beer feels a little too déclassé. Otherwise, you can find beer-can chicken recipes at Epicurious.com and Food Network, or hanging out with Baltimore Mick. For detailed, step-by-step instructions, see About.com.

Jenny Rosenstrach, Features Director

 

For a good part of my life, my mother made dinner using her three-quart mustard yellow Dansk enamelware frying pan. To her, no other cookware could compare. It browned meat beautifully, it was responsive to heating and cooling, it moved from stove top to oven easily. Even when its signature wooden handle fell off in the mid-80s and she couldn't find a new one to replace it, she continued to use the pan. (But at that point, transferring it from stove top to oven became a more complicated process involving fast hands and elaborate layers of dish towels wrapped around its rim.) It wasn't until a full decade later that the stalwart of the kitchen (nicknamed "the amputee") was retired. So you can only imagine how happy I was on Mother's Day two years ago when, scavenging around on eBay, I found the very same one in the very same color for $10. Now every year for Mother's Day, I try to add a piece to her collection. There is always an impressive selection of Dansk cookware on the website, and usually I end up buying myself a little something, too. This green one lives on my burner and reminds me of my victory.

Sarah Engler, Associate Editor

Those of us who have various recipe cards floating somewhere between the stained pages of our cookbooks--or who repeatedly bring the laptop into the kitchen because it's easier than printing out (and ultimately losing for the umpteenth time) Grandma's cookie recipe, which Mom e-mailed three years ago--will surely appreciate the brand-new Demy.

This electronic wonder can store up to 2,500 recipes (if you have most of them online, it's easy to download and organize them in lists that make sense to you), and it only takes up as much space on your counter as an index card would. It also has a measurement converter and three built-in timers, and it is completely spill- and heat-proof. And while the Demy can't (yet) warn you that you're out of vanilla before you've gotten the kids all excited, it does have an impressive library of ingredient substitutes.

Adriana Velez | Contributor

Once upon a time, I had a salad spinner. I washed my greens, spun them, and ate salad. Shortly the handle fell off, and I had to spin the greens with a chopstick. Then I began to grow weary of how much space the giant bowl took up in my refrigerator and dishwasher. The salad spinner sat on my shelf for years, until I finally let it loose into the world, where it could plague someone else with false dreams of salad every day.

But then! I came across Spin 'n Stor bags, and we had salad once again. These are plastic bags with an ingenious little feature. You wash your greens, put them in the bag, close it, and whirl the bag around (wheee!), and all of the water collects in a little gutter that runs along the bag's periphery. You pour out the water from the gutter and then save your greens for salad. Watch the fun video. The bags are reusable, too. I'm not big on kitchen gadgets in general, but I love these bags because they make eating healthy a lot easier.

You may find Spin 'n Stor bags at your local market; if not, you can buy them online at Sur la Table or directly from the manufacturer (scroll to the bottom). Ah, the salad days are back!

 

Adriana Velez | Contributor

With all the talk about BPAs in plastic, are you starting to cast a suspicious eye toward all the plastic bottles, plates, cups, and utensils your children have been using? See this as an opportunity to upgrade the aesthetics of your table! Here are a few ideas for getting around the BPA bugbear.

 

Continue reading Nontoxic Tablewear for Tots »

Eleanor Duncan | Associate Copy Editor

Check out Archie McPhee's goofy supplies for your kitchen: among many other wonderful things, a tic-tac-toe toast stamp, a heart egg shaper, and a brain-shaped gelatin mold. On the practical side, try a stainless-steel "chef soap" disk for removing stubborn cooking odors from your hands.

They've got the true bacon lover covered, with everything from bacon-flavored dental floss to bacon-shape bandages. And don't forget to visit the candy section for some Sigmund Freud lollipops! I'm sure there's a rubber chicken around somewhere too....