KNHR's Top Drawer

Homemade Ice Treats With Back To Basics

Did you ever make homemade popsicles when you were a kid? My mom and I would make them every once in awhile, and it was always one of my favorite treats. It's a great kid-friendly activity and kid-friendly treat. Making them at home is way better than you too since you can control the ingredients, sugar, no processed ingredients, etc. Here's a couple products to help bring some fun treats into your freezer.

Back to Basics is introducing at the Housewares Show the Arctic Pops Ice Treat Mold, the Jet/Rocket Ice Pop Mold, the Flute Pops Ice Pop Maker and an Ice Treats Party Pack. Fill them with juice, yogurt, flavored syrups and more for delicious, icy homemade treats. See these new products at Back to Basics' booth L11702.

 

Fun Lunchtime Products

I’m a frequent shopper at Target (who isn’t, right?), and I can’t help but notice how my local Target is currently being dominated by back-to-school items, dorm items and parents shopping with their little kids/middle schoolers/college freshmen. Back-to-school shopping was always one of my favorite things to do. It was exciting to pick out new clothes and shoes, notebooks and pens, backpacks and lunch boxes each year in August.

For those of you who might be prepping your kids for school (or prepping for school yourself), here’s a closer look at a couple items I mentioned in my back-to-school products article from the August print issue of Kitchenware News & Housewares Review. For those of you with elementary-aged children, you might want to pack their lunch in these Thermos food jars, and pack some juice or water in an accompanying beverage bottle. Your little ones will love carrying their lunch along in a container emblazoned with their favorite characters, and you’ll appreciate how the food jars keep their lunches at the appropriate temperature.

 

(Thermos Hello Kitty beverage bottle)

 

(Thermos Hello Kitty food jar)

For a slightly older crowd, Built NY makes terrific-looking lunch totes, appropriate for high schoolers, college students, even for the adult taking lunch to the office. The neoprene keeps food insulated, and the stylish bag designs are fun to look at and also make it fun to carry around. These Built NY bags turn your lunch into an accessory.

I would carry my lunch in this, for sure. It's Built NY's Vine lunch bag.

Back-to-School Lessons with Curious Chef

Learning is fun when it happens in the kitchen, and Curious Chef suggests a number of ways in which cooking can be used to teach your kids. Here are some examples.

Take recipes apart to teach your kid math skills such as multiplication, addition and fractions.

Cooking can be a chemistry experiment when trying to learn what happens when heat or cold is applied to a dish or object.

Work on following directions by reading through and performing a recipe's directions step-by-step.

Spending time in the kitchen and helping to prepare meals is a great opportunity to teach kids about healthy eating habits and maintaining good health.

Decorating cakes and cupcakes encourages creativity.

And finally, Curious Chef recommends teaching social studies by studying foods from various cultures.

Let your kids help you in the kitchen this school year and reinforce their school lessons. Curious Chef offers a line of kid-sized kitchen tools that will add to the fun. There are utensils, gadgets, tools for mixing and measuring, kid-safe cutlery and cookie cutters. Visit their website, curiouschef.com, to see the complete product line-up. Learning will become more fun, you and your child will enjoy spending more time together, and maybe, you'll even end up raising the next up-and-coming chef!

Zoom Zoom with Chef'n's GarlicZoom XL

I love garlic. I use it in almost all of my dishes, and I use cloves upon cloves of it. The thing is, I usually have to chop or mince it up, and I hate doing that. Chopping garlic feels so tedious, and it makes your fingers all sticky. It’s one of my least favorite tasks. But it’s OK, because Chef’n figured out what to do about sticky garlic fingers, and it even makes chopping garlic fun!

The GarlicZoom XL is a bigger version of their original GarlicZoom, a rolling garlic chopper. How it works is you fill the chopper with cloves of garlic and then roll the chopper! The blades inside rotate and chop up your garlic as it rolls. How simple is that? The GarlicZoom XL is dishwasher safe, suggested retail is $14.99, and is available at Williams-Sonoma and Chefs Resource.

Eating Monstrously with Monster Fun Bowls

It’s summer, and there’s ice cream (see previous entry), and you just want to have some fun, right? I know I do! But since I can’t ignore my responsibilities for three months (after all, you need to read this blog), I have to be a little more creative. That’s why I might have to start eating my ice cream out of these monster fun bowls from MSC International with a matching spoon. I know this was designed with kids in mind, but I love them a little bit, too. The bowl comes in three color options, and I guarantee it will bring a smile to your kids’ faces. And yours too. Suggested retail price is $3.99.

Ahhhh! It's looking at me!