There’s a new flower in the garden of Ayala’s Herbal Water. Lemon Verbena Germanium smells and tastes just like geraniums accented with lemon verbena (which some will recall as Ellen O’Hara’s—mother of Scarlett—favorite scent). Like the rest of the flavors, it’s refreshing, delightful and wonderfully different.

Ayala’s infuses organic garden herbs, blended with spices and citrus peel, into purified water to create innovative flavor profiles. We love this line; it complements food so much better than other flavored waters. The rest of the line includes Cinnamon Orange Peel, Clove Cardamom Cinnamon, Ginger Lemon Peel, Lavender Mint Lemongrass Thyme and Lemongrass Mint Vanilla. The first three are wonderful Thanksgiving flavors, especially welcomed by guests who don’t drink.

Ayala’s Herbal Water has zero calories and is certified USDA Organic and OU kosher. It is available at HerbalWater.com and at retailers nationwide, including Central Market, Food Emporium, Giant, HEB, Raley’s, Safeway, Wegmans, Whole Foods Market and many natural food and specialty food stores.

It’s different and it’s delicious! Photo courtesy of Ayala’s.

It’s effortless to save the world by drinking
organic, Fair Trade coffee. Photo by
Ermek | IST.

With coffee emporia nearly everywhere you look—cafés and shops that sell beans—you’d think that coffee was a hot growth category. Yet the annual growth rate of conventional coffee between 2000 and 2008 was just 1.5%. Organic coffee imports experienced a 29% annual average growth rate during the same period, and Fair Trade® coffee, 35%. Last year, the amount of organic coffee imported into the United States increased 12%, and Fair Trade coffee increased 30%, despite the worst economy in 70 years and the premium prices that both command.

You’d think this would be great news, but just 0.6% of the coffee sold in the major consuming countries is organic certified, and even less is Fair Trade certified.

In honor of National Fair Trade Month, we’ve reviewed some of our favorite organic and Fair Trade coffees. Agricultural products can be organic and Fair Trade, organic or Fair Trade (obviously, the vast majority of foods are neither). What do these terms mean? In brief:

Yet of the $18 billion spent on coffee in the U.S. last year, the tiniest fraction went to organic and Fair Trade coffee. You can make a difference while enjoying an excellent cup of java.

Parents who insist on the best for their children have two new choices in the popular all-natural Mac & Cheese from Annie’s Homegrown.

Our investigative adult palates preferred the slightly more sophisticated taste of the 5-Grain variety, but we’re betting the nuances will be lost on kids. They’ll only note that the 5-Grain is white, not orange. Try the tip from Annie’s Homegrown to substitute yogurt for the milk for a tangier taste.

Annie’s Homegrown has also launched new Organic Cheddar Snack Mix Bunnies: crunchy Cheddar bunny crackers, buttery bunny crackers and pretzels, with a light seasoning of Organic Valley Cheddar cheese. Visit Annies.com to learn more.

Save some for the kids! A favorite snack mix, USDA-certified organic. Photo by Hannah
Kaminsky | THE NIBBLE.

As satisfying as a candy bar, and so much
better for you! Photo by Emily Chang |
THE NIBBLE.

A delicious new quartet of 70% organic Luna Bars arrived on our desk, just in time for breakfast (when you’re in the food review business, breakfast can be anything from olive oil to brownies). We think of these “whole nutrition bar[s] for women” as a better-for-you candy bar (they’re low glycemic as well as nutritious). They have a wonderful soy rice crisp crunch and just enough of a chocolaty, peanut butter or lemon coating on the bottom of the bar to pass as a candy fix.

We like them all, with a preference for Lemon Zest and White Chocolate Macadamia for their superior intensity of flavor. The line is certified kosher (dairy) by KOF-K.

The bars weigh in at 180-190 calories. If Luna Bars were sold at candy counters, there would be no decision required—these are a better choice. LUNA is a sponsor of the Breast Cancer Fund.

If you regularly buy organic chocolate, you’ve probably tried Green & Black’s. If you’re not “experienced” with G&B’s, you’re in luck: The line is widely available at retail as well as online. The U.K.-based company was a pioneer in the organic chocolate space, the world’s first organic, Fair Trade chocolate company. It has helped the cacao farmers of Belize stay on their farms and do what they love—grow cacao—instead of taking city jobs to support their families. Green & Black’s has proved that a company can be committed to environmental sustainability and Fair Trade prices, and still make a tidy profit. In fact, Green & Black’s organic chocolate is the U.K.’s fastest-growing confectionary brand, which prompted corporate giant Cadbury Schweppes to purchase Green & Black’s, in which it had a small stake, in May 2005.

Most of Green & Black’s bars are flavored, with four notable exceptions: two darks, a milk and a white. What we like most about G&B’s bars is that the flavors are never coy on the palate; they’re strong and forthright, demanding your attention with every bite. Read the full review for more about Green & Black’s chocolate bars—available in 13 varieties.

If you are a fan of dark chocolate, then you’ll fall in love with G&B’s 70% Dark Chocolate bar.

You can mix just about anything into a base of rolled oats and call it granola. Dried fruit and nuts are most popular. Sweeteners are the “wet ingredients”: agave, applesauce, brown rice syrup, honey or maple syrup. Spices run the gamut from “everyday” flavors like cinnamon and vanilla to cardamom and nutmeg. Some people get healthy with wheat germ and flaxseed. You can make Asian granola (sesame seeds, crystallized ginger), Florida granola (orange zest), Trail Mix granola (raisins, cashews, chocolate chips, sunflower seeds) or anything that inspires you.

Granola Girl keeps it simple: Currently there are just two flavors—Maple Pecan and Cranberry Almond—both with near-universal appeal (both have nuts). The flavor profiles are delicate—nothing overwhelming, yet everything in perfect balance. They are sweetened very lightly, as well. The granolas are baked with canola oil and are so moist that no milk or yogurt is needed. These are not “crunchy,” baked-until-crisp granolas, yet the texture of the oats is chewy and lovely. That’s why we find them so different and so much more appealing than many of the less distinctive granolas we try. While not certified organic, they’re made with organic oats and oat bran.

No need to add milk to this moist, yummy granola.

For centuries, ghee has been a cornerstone of Ayurvedic medicine, the ancient Hindu art of healing and of prolonging life. Now, it’s poised to become an important ingredient to people who will never cook Indian food.

What’s ghee? It’s similar to clarified butter, but the processes and end products differ somewhat. Clarified butter (or drawn butter) is familiar to anyone who has ordered lobster at a restaurant. The clear melted butter has been rendered (melted by simmering) to separate the milk solids from the butterfat and evaporate the water. It’s a more elegant way to serve melted butter, which otherwise looks sudsy. Chefs also use clarified butter to sauté, because with the milk solids gone, ghee has an extremely high smoke point, 485°F (252°C, higher than canola oil—only rice bran oil, safflower oil and avocado oil are higher).

Ghee requires a longer simmering process, which removes all of the water and milk solids. There’s no lactose left in ghee; the lactose intolerant can slather it over everything and enjoy all the buttery goodness they want. (Well, check with your cardiologist on that latter point.)

Ancient Organics ghee is made from the organic butter of Straus Family Creamery. Photo by Corey Lugg | THE NIBBLE.

Ancient Organics, a company dedicated to the principles of Ayurvedic medicine, makes its ghee from one of the best-known butters in America: the organic-certified butter of the acclaimed Straus Family Creamery. Across the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County, California, on the shores of beautiful Tomales Bay, happy Straus cows graze on green grass under blue skies. Their milk is churned in small batches in an old-fashioned 1950s-era butter churn. The result is rich, sweet and creamy butter with an 85% butterfat content (the USDA minimum requirement is 80%).

Ancient Organics takes this precious butter and separates it into the golden butterfat known as ghee. Whether or not you want to learn more about the medicinal benefits of ghee (according to Ayurveda), if you sauté, fry or stir-fry, you should get to know ghee.

The True Brew crew: organic iced tea.

June is National Iced Tea Month, and there’s a new bottled tea in town: True Brew. Made in Texas, where people like their iced tea sweet, the line offers sweetened varieties, with unsweetened black, green and white teas for purists.

The unsweetened teas have zero calories; the sweetened teas, which employ organic cane sugar, have between 64 and 72 calories per 8-ounce serving.

While we normally drink our tea unsweetened—iced or hot—to enjoy the flavor of the quality tea we buy, our favorite of the line was the Sweet Tea. It tasted exactly like what one would brew at home and drink with two teaspoons of sugar (in fact, it tasted exactly like the iced tea we made through our teens and college years, before we started to drink our tea and coffee black).

The Unsweetened Green Tea was the third place winner in the Iced Tea Class at the recent 2009 World Tea Championships (first place went to ITO EN’s Oi Ocha Dark [a NIBBLE Top Pick Of The Week], second place to Wegman’s Just Tea—Green, a private label brand that is brewed for them by someone—we’ll have to track down who). Green tea connoisseurs will like it—it has the vegetal flavors of a complex green tea.

The flavor profiles are very different from Honest Tea, the first organic bottled tea line. Unlike Honest Tea, the entire True Brew line is packaged in a PET bottle (the only resin [plastic] approved by the FDA to have post-consumer recycled content). Organic tea drinkers seeking an alternative should give it a try.

There’s another reason everyone who drinks bottled tea should take a look at True Brew: the higher antioxidant content. The company claims a polyphenol count that is higher than some competitors. Based on a Men’s Health article that compared green tea varieties from Harney and Sons, Lipton, Tazo and Snapple, True Brew has more polyphenols per bottle. True Brew actually lists the polyphenol count on the bottle, although somewhat strangely, the number stated is the amount per liter instead of how much is in the 16-ounce bottle.

The price is right: True Brew has been retailing at $1.00 per bottle! Find store locations at TrueBrew.com.

Oikos Greek Yogurt is thicker than regular yogurt, but not as thick as FAGE Total Greek yogurt or another relative newcomer, Chobani probiotic Greek yogurt, both of which can pass for thick sour cream. There’s a big difference in the texture—with Oikos being more like “normal” yogurt—as well as in the flavor. Whereas FAGE Total and Chobani can sometimes pass for sour cream (wishful thinking), Oikos is definitely yogurt.

Read the full review and find out what makes a yogurt “Greek.”

Oikos Organic Greek Yogurt is fat free, organic and kosher. Photo by Hannah Kaminsky | THE NIBBLE.

While their natural mate is hummos or baba ganoush, these chips pair perfectly with yogurt or sour cream based dips. Try them with Greek tzatziki, Indian raita or an Indian layered dip.

- See more of our favorite chips in our Snacks Section.

- Then, find some great dips to pair them with—product reviews plus recipes for everything from hummos to salsa to guacamole.

- Finally, a nice microbrew or an all-natural soft drink.

The taste of falafel, in crispy chip form.