Teaching Kids To Cook With Organic Ingredients

Handstand Kids cookbooks offer kids a fun, hands-on learning experience, while getting them excited about the world in which they live, and they do it with organic ingredients. Each cookbook introduces kid chefs to one country and comes with a delightful cooking accessory. The first book in this series journeys to Italy and comes complete with a chef’s hat, packaged together in a pizza box. The second, about Mexico, is in a tortilla bag along with an oven mitt, and has been named Toy Directory’s Top Toy of 2008.

As well as buying the book, there are now also Handstand Kids Cooking Classes that offer kid chefs a “hands-on, yummy cooking experience”. Each class uses organic ingredients to make healthy & delicious foods from around the world, along with holiday treats to share with the family!

If you order a cookbook in October (i.e the next couple of days – sorry about the late notice!) from the Handstand Kids website ($28) you will also receive a new eco-friendly child’s reusable shopping bag for FREE that you can use for grocery shopping (an $8 value).

VerTerra Natural Dinnerware Eco Product Review

VerTerra dinnerware are plates, bowls and platters that are made from 100% fallen leaves.

No glue, chemicals, varnishes, or bonding agents are used. The plates go through three levels of sterlization: steaming; high-pressure spraying; and UV sterilizing (while recapturing at least 80% of the water) and then are heated in an oven. It has taken them two years to perfect a safe product.

I’ve embedded a video below to show the plates in more details. If you’re reading from RSS and can’t see the video, please click here.

Each piece is made from 100% renewable and compostable plant matter and water. You can even use it to reheat in the microwave, bake in the oven, or cool in the fridge. The plates were really strong when I tested, destroying them took a lot more effort than paper or plastic. They worked well when wet and can simply be dried off and used again with no ill effects.

They are made in South Asia, and the leaves will biodegrade when composted in about 2 – 3 months. Check out their products at the VerTerra website.

The Wholeleaf Co. Palm Leaf Plates Eco Product Review

We’ve tested different disposable plates on Life Goggles before – the ones made from potatos which Kev looked at and ones made from sal and siali leaves that I looked at. So when I was given some made from the Areca palm tree I jumped at the chance to test them.

Made by the Wholeleaf Company, the plates are made in southern India from leaves that have naturally fallen to the ground. Usually these sheaths are burned, fed to animals or composted. The Wholeleaf Co turn them into plates and bowls by soaking the leaves in local spring water, and hot stamping them with a mould by hand to make the plate and then cutting away the rough edges. The heat also sterilises the plates. And that’s it. They are produced by marginalise rural people and claim that if all the fallen leaves were used in this way they would employ 300,000 people!

But how do they work? Very well is the answer. I would have thought being made out of wood that some juice of my dinner would seep through but no, they’re well sealed and not even that easy to cut with a normal knife.

As you can see from the picture they’re strong too, although maybe if I’d had another orange I may have caused a problem, but they’d be perfect for a barbeque or a buffet where holding the plate with one hand is needed. Also you can see how different each one looks, I think that’s part of the charm.

Although they’re a disposable product – just put them on the compost heap when you’re finished – I did try and wash one. A quick wipe and you can use them again, but soak one and it loses shape.

The Wholeleaf Co. supplied the BBC Good Food Show this year and have a huge range of products – bowls, dishes, plates and so on, take a look at the website for more details. Or go to Nigel’s Eco Store where they’re £11.75 for a set of 25 plates, they have bowls too.

Advertising That’s Alive

I’m not going to get into the whole debate of the “green-ness” of McDonalds, but this has been doing the rounds on green websites. McDonalds have created an outdoor advertising billboard that grows over time. Created by Leo Burnett ad agency in Chicago, the advert grows lettuce to advertise their fresh salads. No news if they’re organic or not…

Riverford Organic Food Delivery Eco Product Review

Riverford Organic Vegetables is a delivery service of food to your front door. Although it has ‘vegetables’ in the name, it also delivers fruit, meat and a multitude of other things – fruit juices, organic beer, eggs etc.

Riverford is the name of the farm where it all started in Devon, in the UK, but it’s now a franchise scheme with various farms around the country delivering fresh, organic fruit and veg to your door. Although pictured is their mini fruit and veg box, we started off with their summer box – full of calabrese broccoli, aranca tomatoes, peppers, mushrooms and so on. The boxes change every week and you can check out the website to get a box that suits you.

Prices range from £7.90 for the mini to £14.95 for the large. You can get extras on top and there’s even a meant box starting at £48.95. That initially seems quite expensive, but once we added it up – and saw the amount we got – it works out quite reasonably.

Probably the best compliment I can give is that although we received out first box free for reviewing purposes, we’ve now become fully signed up members and have a box delivered every week. We’re still working out the ideal size box for the two of us and I think most people will go through that and set up a regular order, if not every week then every other week – the flexibility of the scheme is a great attraction. You can cancel orders while you go on holiday, order more if you have friends round or change the type of box you want each week.

The quality of food is exceptional too – everything’s fresh and tasty. It’s no exaggeration to say I’ve never tasted a salad so flavoursome – the mixed salad lettuce had quite a kick. We’ve also found it ‘forces’ you to eat healthily. Every time we look in the fridge we have vegetables to make dinner from. In fact it’s been a bit of a challenge to know what to cook. What I thought were spring onions turned out to be wet garlic, which I didn’t have a clue what to do with. A quick Google search and what site came up second in the list? Riverford Organic Vegetables of course – with a recipe for potato cakes with wet garlic which I duly made. In fact the website is full of ideas what to do with your veg, although I found the search function not to be very effective and Google worked much better.

While some of the fruit and vegetables do come outside of the UK, they have introduced a UK only box so you can choose where your food comes from. All the food is organic though and delivered staraight to your door. While some of the products come in plastic bags – pak choi, lettuce etc, the boxes it arrives in are returned and reused. And our local guy is very friendly too – we’ll be interviewing Chris on Life Goggles soon.