This is the great time of year to enjoy apples!

Making your own apple sauce is really easy and it’s a great thing to make with
your kids! They can wash the apples, peel the apples and if they are comfortable with a knife then they can help you chop up the apples too! We sometimes like to have apple sauce as a treat after dinner and sometimes we just love having it as a little snack We prefer to make our apple sauce without sugar, we just choose a naturally sweet and juicy variety of apple like red or golden delicious!

All you need:

• 1 pound of apples
• 5 -6 tablespoons of water
• cinnamon (to taste – we like to use a lot of cinnamon!)

Wash the apples. Peel them, remove the core and then slice into small chunks. Place your apples into a saucepan and bring to boil. Reduce the heat to a simmer and sprinkle in your cinnamon. Simmer the apples until soft. Be sure to stir often to prevent burning!!! We learned that the hard way Once they are nice and soft you can serve the apple sauce warm or cold!

Happy Healthy Eating

Kia

Kia Robertson is a mom and the creator of the Today I Ate A Rainbow kit; a tool that helps parents establish healthy habits by setting the goal of eating a rainbow of fruits and vegetables every day. Kia is passionate about creating tools that help parents raise healthy kids!

With Christmas around the corner, it’s time to start planning ways to incorporate fruits and veggies into your festive meals! We all tend to indulge at this time of year so it’s always a great idea to balance that out by eating a rainbow of fruits and vegetables. Around here eating and serving fruits and veggies has to be fun! This broccoli tree with tomato decorations and a star made out of a yam makes a delicious and healthy centerpiece!

Put out some dip and watch the tree disappear

To make these trees you need a styrofoam cone shape…we used one the was 98mm (3-7/8 in) x 301mm (11-7/8in) and trimmed a lot off of the bottom in fact I would suggest cutting the cone half way down so that it doesn’t take up too much broccoli! We used 6 large heads of broccoli for our tree.

I recommend using extra long tooth pics so that you can trim them down for the top of the tree and then use the full size on the bottom…this helps to make the tree extend out at the bottom! You could easily sprinkle in some cauliflower in there to make it look like some snow on the tree. I cut our star out of a piece of yam…but feel free to use anything that you have on hand!

We hope this Holiday Season is full of love and laughter for you! Wishing you Health and Happiness in the new year!!!!

 
Happy Healthy Eating,
Kia

Kia Robertson is a mom and the creator of the Today I Ate A Rainbow kit; a tool that helps parents establish healthy habits by setting the goal of eating a rainbow of fruits and vegetables every day. Kia is passionate about creating tools that help parents raise healthy kids!

Halloween is a really fun tradition and as all you Green Halloween fans know, it can celebrated in ways that are good for our bodies and for the earth! It’s so fun to get dressed up and live in a world of make believe for a day! The scary party might just be all the candy and junk food that most likely has made its way into your house. I think Halloween is the perfect time to show parents that when junk food is in the house it’s hard not to eat it…this is the same all year long…it just gets amplified on this day! If you keep all the candy and treats just pay attention to how much harder it is resist. It’s an excellent example of why healthy eating is so much easier if you don’t bring tempting junk food into the house!

Need ideas for getting the candy out of the house?  Here are 10:

1. Give your kids a chance to choose their favorite treats and give them one per day for a week.
2. Have a visit from the switch witch and trade the candy for a toy or maybe some money. There is even a book about the Switch Witch!  Or maybe a Candy Fairy can come for a visit!
3. Find out if a dentist in your area is taking candy in exchange for toys. There are many dentists that offer this buy back type of service! Halloween Candy Buy Back!
4. Send candy to soldiers…just Google that phrase and you’ll find quite a few sites with information such as Operation Gratitude.
5. Take some to nursing homes or women’s shelters.
6. Do some baking with some of those sweets and share with your neighbors.
7. Save some to decorate your Gingerbread houses at Christmas time!
8. Turn it into a science experiment.
9. Give some to the grandparents, grown up cousins that are “too old” to trick or treat, or to aunts and uncles that don’t have kids!
10. Take it to work!  If you work from home do one of the above or else you’ll probably find yourself “snacking” more often than you’d like!

So enjoy the festivities, have some sweets and then be sure to feed your families extra fruits and veggies to help your bodies process it all! Perhaps make these Rainbow Fruit sticks!

 
Happy Healthy Halloween!

Kia

Kia Robertson is a mom and the creator of the Today I Ate A Rainbow kit; a tool that helps parents establish healthy habits by setting the goal of eating a rainbow of fruits and vegetables every day. Kia is passionate about creating tools that help parents raise healthy kids!

Put a blindfold over guest's eyes for an ooooey, gooey Halloween surprise!

To make any kid’s Halloween party a bit more fun and interesting, spice it up with a little game.  Set out bowls and trays full of different textured items such as, peaches from a can, jello, and yogurt.  Have each kid take a turn being blind-folded as you guide them over the table to feel out each type of food and texture.  I guarantee you’ll get an “ewwwwww,” reaction when syrupy canned fruits feel like brains and other disgusting images the mind can conjure.  Meantime, the other kids will be giggling and laughing at this simple, old fashioned game.  Once the blind-fold is off, the player will giggle at how their mind played a silly Halloween prank on them.

Blogger Laurali Star owns her own little shop on The Damsel in the Attic!

Green Halloween® is a nationwide non-profit initiative started by mother-daughter team Corey Colwell-Lipson and Lynn Colwell. In 2010, Green Halloween became a program of EcoMom® Alliance and has events in cities across the U.S.

By Lynn

Last winter, with my husband’s help–OK, OK, all I did was supervise, i.e. tell him what to do–we made a dowel Christmas tree. At the time I thought we could use it for any holiday, but of course, I forgot about most of them until last weekend when we were celebrating my two granddaughters’ birthdays.

I brought out the tree and a mass of pre-used items including:

• bottle caps
• silver foil
• pipe cleaners
• paper
• “jewels”
• wooden beads
• wire
• paperclips
• bolts

..and lots of other odds and ends.

I set everything on the table and the kids (and a few grownups), had a ball making ornaments for the tree.

Here’s the overall result:

And here are just a few of the ornaments:

Everyone had a ball! Even our grandson who isn’t usually into art projects, spent at least an hour hunched over his work and came up with, among other items, the skeleton above.

If you have a Halloween party coming up and you’re thinking about activities, consider something like this. You don’t have to make the tree. Just get a branch, put it in a bucket filled with rocks and start decorating!

Corey did a segment on the news here in Seattle, that included the Halloween tree. And I’m already thinking about repeating this activity for Thanksgiving!

If you have made something similar, we’d love to see pictures!

Lynn Colwell and Corey Colwell-Lipson are mother and daughter and authors of  Celebrate Green! Creating Eco-Savvy Holidays, Celebrations and Traditions for the Whole Family, and founders of Green Halloween®.