We admit it: We ate all the Hawaiian Punch
Splashers. Photo courtesy Farley’s & Sathers.

We were never a Hawaiian Punch fan. Even as a child, we found it to be “kid stuff” and far preferred Mom’s homemade punch (a mixture of three flavors of frozen juice: lemonade, grape juice and orange juice—try it!).

But how about a nice Hawaiian Punch fruit snack? How about gummy-like Hawaiian Punch Splashers,* filled with juice?

*Credit goes to Gushers liquid-filled fruit snacks, made by General Mills.

We raised an eyebrow when the new Hawaiian Punch and Mott’s snacks arrived at THE NIBBLE offices. We approach most kid-targeted, mass-produced foods warily.

But we enjoyed Hawaiian Punch Splashers so much, we hoarded them from the rest of the NIBBLE staff.

The two Hawaiian Punch snack varieties, Hawaiian Punch Splashers Fruit Snacks and Hawaiian Punch Fruit Snacks, include 100% DV of vitamin C and 90 calories per serving. Lowfat (and with no saturated fats), they deliver a big Hawaiian Punch of flavor. Both are equally tasty, but the revived kid in us prefers the splash of juice in the Splashers. Both products are available in nine-ounce boxes of 10 single serve pouches.

The products are produced by Farley’s & Sathers, a major manufacturer of candies including Brach’s, Chuckles, Heide, Jujyfruits and Jujubes, among other brands. Riding the wave of popularity of fruit snacks, a fast-growing category, the company has licensed the Hawaiian Punch and Motts brand names.

We found less flavor in the Mott’s Medleys Fruit Snacks, although we did enjoy the teeny, cube-shaped Motts For Tots Fruit Snacks. They’d make a fun garnish for ice cream or frozen yogurt.

Two of our index cards combine in this
salmon-avocado salad. Photo courtesy Whole
Foods Market. Get the recipe.

Over the last month, one million people searched Google for “healthy recipes.”

You can search, and you can buy healthy recipe cookbooks.

But you can also invent your own recipes; and use the occasion as a teaching game for the family. (Plan now to start playing next weekend.)

Here’s the game:

1. Announce the rules: First, each family member develops a list of healthy foods. (If your children are old enough, they also need to know why it’s a healthy ingredient—as do adult participants.) The person with the most gets a prize, to be determined by you. The family will gather on [date] and [time] for the next leg.

2. Next, everyone brings his or her list to the dinner table (or other place and time you designate) and take turns reading them out. You place each new food item on a separate index card. (For example, only make one card for brown rice, even if everyone has it on his/her list.)

3. Here’s the hard part: You have to know if an ingredient is healthy so you can keep it or reject it. For example, cacao, the base of chocolate, has great health properties; but not when mixed with sugar! If you don’t know, make looking it up part of the game.

4. Now that you have ingredients, it’s onto the next leg: creating recipes from them. Spread the cards out on the table so everyone can see them. Go around the table, asking each person in turn to suggest a combination of ingredients and a recipe (for example, grilled fish, grape and red onion tacos). Write the suggested recipe on a pad, along with the name of the person who suggested it.

5. Finally, you get to make the recipes. Print out a calendar and place the recipes on specific days of the month (it’s easier to plan the meals).

6. After each healthy recipe is made, vote on whether it goes, stays or needs to be revised. Take the time to reinforce why the recipe is healthy, and which ingredients are the healthiest. Mark on the calendar which recipes are “winners.”

7. At the end of 30 days, tally the winning recipes and declare a winner. Now, you can start the process over again.

My Little Cupcake’s cupcake molds make mini cupcakes on a stick. They’re irresistible.

Six lucky winners will each receive a set of four My Little Cupcake molds—guaranteed to become the most popular molds in the house. For a kids’ project, there’s a no-bake cupcake recipe (simply make a dough from cream cheese and ground chocolate sandwich cookies—it’s delish) and push the dough into the mold. There are other recipes as well.

Once popped out of the mold, a lollipop stick can be added (we dipped pretzel sticks in chocolate) and the cupcakes can be decorated with sprinkles, mini chips, etc.

The little cupcakes make charming ice cream toppers. We decorated a whole layer cake with mini cupcakes. Learn more at MyLittleCupcakePop.com.

The mini pink mold on the left produces the
mini cupcakes the right. Photo courtesy My Little Cupcake.

Your favorite slugger will be delighted to receive a box of baseball-shaped shortbread cookies from Cooperstown, New York—home of the National Baseball Hall Of Fame.

Delicious, buttery shortbread is packaged into a tin representing the recipient’s favorite team, or in this National Baseball Hall Of Fame commemorative baseball tin, for as little as $14.95.

Many gift variations, including gift towers, are available. If you’re a shortbread lover, you’ll want to get some for yourself (a cellophane Bag O’ Bunts with a team sticker is just $5.99).

A commemorative tin full of baseball-
shaped shortbread. Photo courtesy
Cooperstown Cookie Company.

How do you keep a sliced apple from turning brown?

Our grandmother dipped the slices into a solution of lemon juice and water. But the experts at the U.S. Apple Association recommend fortified apple juice, a better alternative not available to Granny (or to Mom, either).

The vitamin C that is used to fortify apple juice contains the same ascorbic acid as lemon juice. And it maintains the flavor.

So toss those apple slices into a bowl of fortified apple juice until you’re ready to serve or use them. There’s no need to toss out the apple juice: Drink it!

As with all fruits and vegetables, each cultivar (variety) has unique properties. In the case of apples, some varieties brown more quickly than others. So the second part of the tip is to look for “slicing apples” with better browning qualities.

If you want to serve apple slices, or keep
them from browning as you prepare a pie,
use this tip. Photo courtesy U.S. Apple
Association.

Help turn your favorite kid into a curious
chef. Photo courtesy CuriousChef.com.

As the Chinese proverb so wisely states, give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

Hand a kid a meal and he never learns to cook. Teach a kid to cook and spare him from a lifetime of unhealthy take-out and salt-and-sugar-laden processed food.

Even preschool children can be given safe and simple tasks, learn the love of cooking and take pride that the whole family is eating “their” food.

It may take a small investment of time up-front to teach a kid how to stir seasonings [neatly] into a yogurt dip or tear lettuce into the right-size pieces. But you may end up with a teen who loves to cook the family dinner.

Start a young’un out with this kid-size cooking set from Curious Chefs. It includes 27 pieces the child can call his or her own:

The set is $59.99 at CuriousChef.com. Other combinations of items are available.

It’s fun to play with your food. Photo
courtesy WorldwideFred.com.

If your kids won’t finish their food, at least let them play with it.

Food face, available with a man’s or woman’s face, is a ceramic plate that gives children (or the child within) free reign to play with his or her food.

The 8-1/2-inch plate is $12 to $13. If you give one to every member of the family, there can be nightly food art competitions. It’s also a fun party activity.

Apple juice without sugar guilt. Photo
by River Soma | THE NIBBLE.

We love shopping at farmers markets in the crisp fall air, loading up on our favorite Honeycrisp apples (the texture is the best!).

And when we see fresh-from-the-farm apple juice, we can’t help but take home a jug.

Unfortunately, that half gallon of sweet apple juice, our version of Proust’s madeleines, disappears all too quickly—at about 120 calories per eight-ounce glass. It’s refreshing, but so is Trop50 Farmstand Apple juice drink, a better choice for people who like to drink tall glasses of juice.

Thanks to Tropicana, apple juice lovers can have an eight-ounce glass of crisp-tasting apple juice beverage for fewer than half the calories of conventional juice. Trop50 Farmstand Apple has 50% less sugar and calories, and no artificial sweeteners. (It uses Pure Via stevia, an added sweetener that comes from a South American herb and is totally natural.)

At 50 calories per eight-ounce glass, Trop50 Farmstand Apple “squeezes in” a full day’s supply of vitamin C and is a good source of the antioxidant vitamin E. In addition to pleasing adult calorie-counters, it’s a great product for kids.

“The taste of Trop50 Farmstand Apple doesn’t fall far from the apple tree,” says Tropicana. We agree!

The 59-ounce bottle has a suggested retail price of $3.59 and can be found in the chilled juice section of the supermarket.

The redesigned, curvy plastic bottle is so sleek, we’ve repurposed the empties in the fridge as water bottles.

Oops: National Gummy Worm Day, which was yesterday, flew by before we had a chance to post this recipe.

The dessert, “Dirt In A Box,” was created by Ruby Foo’s restaurant in Times Square, New York City. It’s a no-cook “dirt pudding” or trifle, decorated with Gummy Worms.

You can make the recipe more elaborate, or turn it into a dirt cake, by preparing it in a small casserole or cake pan. Our preference is to use a small, clean flowerpot (we ran ours through the dishwasher).

While we’d prefer a flowerpot, a box
works just fine. Photo courtesy Ruby Foo’s.

Disposable plastic food bags were introduced in 1964. Overnight they changed the way people carried their sandwiches and carrot sticks to lunch. (The prior options were aluminum foil, paper bags and wax paper.)

Baggies and the variations that followed made it easy to transport food and keep it moist. But flash forward to the present: Every day, more than 20 million sandwich bags from school lunches alone end up in landfills.

Three green moms with a mission designed an alternative kids’ lunch bags. Their solution, LunchSkins, are a fine work of engineering: The plastic-lined bags are made from pastry bag material and go straight into the dishwasher for cleaning. The colorful designs have a velcro closure. There’s even a place to write the owner’s name with a permanent marker.

Reduce landfill waste: Pack sandwiches
and snacks in LunchSkins.

Reduce landfill waste, save money, eat healthy and look stylish while you’re doing it: LunchSkins kids’ lunch bags are the answer to plastic baggie pollution. Buy them at LunchSkins.com.

Find more of our favorite kids’ products.