Love home-made pancakes and waffles, but just don’t have those lazy three minutes to throw the ingredients together? Well fret no more: the organic Batter Blaster is here!
Yes, this is real. Aerosol pancake batter.
God, I’m a sucker for ridonkulous retro commercials.
This debonair young man belongs to the blog PrettyFlyForABabyGuy, where he shows off several of his finest food-based looks. Is that Blueberry Steel?
I don’t remember the mountain expedition part (was that down past Mr. Hooper’s store?) but this was too good to miss. More in the continuing moral decline of the once-innocent Cookie Monster.
From SeeMikeDraw
According to a study out of the Universitites of Exeter and Oxford, it was found that women who ate a hearty, healthy breakfast were more likely to conceive a son.
In a rather stunning development, women who ate at least one bowl of cereal per day pre-conception were found to have the most male babies. Although cereal contains quite a few nutrients, it frightens me that a food which is completely engineered and bears no resemblance to anything in nature should be the key to having a boy.
Suspicious that some sort of cereal company was underwriting the study, I tried, but could find no evidence of shenanigans.
Women who skipped breakfast or ate a breakfast which was low in nutritional value had more girls.
Now does this study demonstrate yet again the superiority of the female sex, or what? When the going gets rough, it’s the girls who come through. But the boys? Oh no, conditions have to be perfect or they won’t even bother showing up for the party.
I’m trying to remember if I ate a lot of cereal before I got pregnant, although I have to admit that I had a “surprise” pregnancy and thus didn’t even know that I was pregnant until over a month and a half later. So goodness knows what I was putting in my body. I know that I certainly wasn’t making any extra effort to eat healthy, nor did pre-natal vitamins pass my lips until the pregnancy was confirmed.
But hey, if you’re a big fan of Lucky Charms, Frosted Flakes, or Fruit Loops and you want a boy, then by all means, chow down!
Yesterday my husband went grocery shopping. He came home with approximately fifteen items. The bill came out to over one hundred dollars, yet there was no filet mignon or fresh crab legs on the list. More like apples, bananas, and whole wheat bagels.
According to this lovely table from the Beareau of Labor Statistics, the year-over-year increase in inflation of food and beverage prices from March of last year to March of this year was a whopping 4.4 percent. But as I stated above, I didn’t need that graph to tell me that the daily cost of living, from food to gasoline, has risen.
Some of the most enjoyable times spent with my son have been the two of us baking in the kitchen. We chat, I try to teach math concepts, he tries to crack eggs without pieces of shell falling into the batter, it’s all good. I have been thinking that it is perhaps time for my budding little chef to fly a bit more solo, and that means a good kids cookbook.
Simple recipes, easy prep, and most of all, recipes that taste good are prerequisites for a cookbook that will be utilized for a long time. As always, I’m here to do the heavy lifting and here are some of the best cookbooks that I could find.
Kids Cooking: A Very Slightly Messy Manual. For younger cooks, easy to follow recipes and great illustrations help out the beginner. And measuring spoons, too!
Pretend Soup and Other Real Recipes: A Cookbook for Preschoolers & Up. 17 easy recipes for your preschooler. Each recipes is printed twice, once in writing and once in pictures. An instant classic.
Honest Pretzels: And 64 Other Amazing Recipes for Cooks Ages 8 & Up. Vegetarian recipes make this book stand out. Recipes that are nutritious and easy to make will have your child wanting to make all of them!
Pink Princess Cookbook. If your little girl is enamored of all things princess-y, then this book filled with yummy tea-time snacks should do just the trick!
BatterUp Kids: Sensational Snacks!. This cookbook is great for kids just getting into the whole cooking thing.
Everything Kids’ Cookbook: From Mac ‘ N Cheese to Double Chocolate Chip Cookies-All You Need to Have Some Finger Lickin’ Fun. A little light on the pictures so better suited for children 9-12, this book has everything from lasagne to smoothies. Also has games and craft ideas.
New Junior Cookbook (Better Homes & Gardens). When I was a youngster, I had my own Better Homes and Gardens Cookie Book, and it was awesome. This one has lots of recipes, you’re covered from breakfast to to dinner. Also has a Cooking Basics chapter which explains about everything from cutting up vegetables to how to read nutrition labels. Also has diabetic exchanges.
Kids Cook!: Fabulous Food for the Whole Family. Detailed instructions, “real” food, also gives nutritional info for the over 150 recipes featured. No color illustrations, but the cook can color while the food is cooking!
I take the blame for one of our least lively rounds. Alas, bananas appear to be devoid of talent as a muse and nobody appears to have seen that Twilight Zone episode. That said, we do have a winner in our most challenging challenge ever, and it is time to announce her:
gemdiva Says:
April 4th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
In what can only be described as a ghastly lapse in judgement the chef for the state dinner honoring the King of the Bananna people mistook the protocol book for a cookbook, effectively severing all diplomatic ties with Bananna Land before they had begun.
Congratulations and whipped topping to gemdiva, who walks away with the trophy once again. Cheeta, what do we have for our winner today? What else could we chose but the Glory leopard thong from Donald J Pliner?
Babies and kids are big business. That’s why there are a million different toys and safety items and educational thingamajigs and anything else that you can think of just for them. Products are trumpeted as the latest and greatest, things that you just can’t live without. But is that really true?
Some of these I sort of covet, but wonder if they make life simpler or just that much more complicated. Are the concepts revolutionary, or just a way to get you to spend some money? Are they truly useful, or are they just products that prey on parental insecurities?
Shampoo Rinse Cup- Instead of a regular cup, this one has a soft, flexible edge to keep the water and shampoo out of eyes. Ummm, how about just being really careful? Although if you have a child that screams bloody murder when water gets on their face, it might be worth it. Although you should discount any future competitive swimming career.
Snack Catchers- I can see why people would like these because they are reusable, but they also seem to possibly go a bit overboard. Don’t say the name of this too fast, though, it could come out a bit raunchy.
Babeebrite Hands Free Mobile Light- This is touted for those 3am diaper changes or for checking on your baby in the middle of the night. It could be the best thing ever, or just another gadget that becomes too much trouble when you can just get a soft night light. Nobody expects a 3am diaper change to be perfect, anyway.
Auto Seat Back Protector- Whatever happened to the good old days when parents would just scream at their kids to stop kicking the back of the car seat, or so help them God, they would pull over?
Child Locator- For twenty bucks, this device will enable you to track your child up to 150 feet away and through concrete walls. In one sense, I think parents should obviously keep track of their kids, but for certain events, I could possibly see the usefulness of this.
Juice Pal- Keeps those annoying juice boxes and pouches from being squeezed too tightly by little hands and spurting all over your beige carpet. I can see where this would come in handy, but kids aren’t supposed to drink a lot of juice, so I’m conflicted.
Inflatable Bathtub Liner- You inflate this with a separately sold pump (because with an infant you just have so much extra time for blowing up liners!) and you simply line the tub so that your child won’t hurt his/her self on the sides of the tub. It isn’t designed to keep your child from slipping in the tub, so I don’t quite see the point.
Crustless Sandwich Cutter- All right, I have to admit I’m a fan of the cute little shapes, but is this truly necessary?
DaysAgo Digital Day Counter- I for one remember being extremely sleep deprived in those infant days, but was I so far gone that I needed to stick a digital counter on my food to tell me if it was still any good? And you have to set the thing to boot.
Stroller Safety Flag- Attach this to your stroller, and everyone will see you! How about just being very conscientious when pushing your stroller, whether it be in a crowd or entering an intersection? And don’t they know that people already avoid women with strollers like the plague?
I would love, love, love to know what you all think of these.
Have fun with this, from the superfantastic Gallery of Regrettable Food:
Remember Tang? It’s what we had before we had SunnyD. Old people remember Tang, and the thing we remember best about it is that the astronauts had Tang in their space ships, and so we wanted it. We wanted it with all the blind zealotry that preschoolers can muster. We wanted to be astronauts, too, and we knew we had the right stuff, and we figured we might as well get a head start by acclimating to the menu as early as possible. But we refused to eat the dehydrated peas, and so we grew up to be bloggers instead.
Where was I?
Ah, yes. The astronaut menu was all about the dehydrated, the freeze-dried, the vacuum-packed, the foil-lined, and the otherwise meddled-with. If you were off to the Moon you wouldn’t think to pack an apple until it had been reduced to something resembling the stuff you scatter on your driveway when it’s icy. THAT is real down-home astronaut cooking. Unappealing, impractical, expensive, and synthetic.
my head almost exploded when I recently found PB2. PB2 is my newest peanut butter obsession. Basically, it’s just powdered peanut butter... a fine, insanely delicious-smelling, peanut butterlicious powder that is EXTREMELY versatile.
According to Bill Keith, head of sales and marketing for Bell Plantation, the company that sells this delightfully bizarre foodstuff, it’s better for you than regular peanut butter.
Here are the nutritional facts : Reg PB has between 190-200 calories per serving, PB2 has 54. Reg PB has between 140-150 fat calories per serving, PB2 has 25. PB2 is all natural. There are no additives.
But wait, there’s more! Sure, it’s self-evidently astro-fabulous, but it is also delightfully reminiscent of some of the shall we say less orthodox archetypes of the Sixties.
As HungryGirl says:
I literally spent an entire Saturday night experimenting with this stuff and had the BEST time (it was not nearly as pathetic as it sounds, I promise).
No word on if she put it in brownies. And from Bill’s recommendations on the RandomThoughts blog:
You mix 2TBS of PB2 w/ 1 TBS of the liquid of your choice. Water will reconstitute it to the consistency of regular PB. You adjust the formula to your taste. JC’s granddaughter likes it w/ grape juice. Try it with your favorite liquid. I know someone that mixes it w/jalapeno juice. Talk about a kick.
Hmmmm. Who would do a thing like that?
