In our ongoing taste adventures, my daughter Hannah and I found a curious looking fruit the other day that we just had to take home and investigate!

The label said it was a prickly pear but when I picked it up I didn’t think it was very prickly. We got home and started washing it…and THAT is when we learned the hard way why it’s called a prickly pear! Our fingers felt like we had slivers up and down them but we couldn’t actually see them!!!  Not our idea of fun but we had to laugh!!  We decided to just ignore the slivers and give the fruit a taste.  Neither of us liked it very much! To be honest I don’t know that we gave it a fair chance because we were slightly annoyed that it gave us so many slivers! The texture was really odd and there wasn’t much flavor.  Not worth the pain in our opinion!

However if you do give a try be sure to wear thick gloves when handling them and give them a good scrub!  Slice both ends of the prickly pear off. Discard them then make one long vertical slice down the body of the prickly pear and peel back the skin.  You’ll be left with the edible prickly pear…you can just chop it up and eat it…seeds and all!

If you’ve tried prickly pear and enjoyed it I’d love to hear from you…maybe I just picked the wrong one…or maybe if I didn’t end up plucking clear slivers out of our hands for a couple of days after eating it I would have given it a more fair chance to win me over

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!

Pumpkin Seeds make a great tasting and healthy snack.  They provide our bodies with zinc which is perfect at this time of  year to help ward off colds!  We love roasting pumpkin seeds and trying different combinations of flavors. We always do some with sea salt, then we mix things up a little by using things like garlic salt and Worcestershire, or for a sweeter flavor we sprinkle on cinnamon and nutmeg! It’s fun to get your kids involved and let them create fun combinations! We’ll share our favorite recipe and cooking method you!

What you’ll need:

Medium Pumpkin
Olive Oil
Sea Salt

What to do:

* Preheat oven to 400 F. Cut open pumpkin and scoop out the insides into a big bowl. Add water to the bowl to help separate the seeds from the stringy flesh (a lot of the seeds will just float up to the top!) and then rinse seeds in a colander.

* To make the seeds nice and crunchy we boil our seeds before putting them in the oven. You can skip this step if you’d like as it’s not essential. In a small pot add the seeds (for a medium pumpkin is around 1/2 cup) to approximately 2 cups of water. Add 1 tablespoon of sea salt. Bring to a boil and then let it simmer for about 10 minutes.

* Remove from heat and drain.

* Spread Olive Oil on the bottom of a roasting pan or rimmed baking sheet then spread the seeds (try not to have the seeds touching). This is also the time to sprinkle on some extra flavor if you’d like!

* Bake on the top rack until the seeds are golden brown, 10 – 20 minutes, depending on how brown you like the seeds.

* Take out of the oven and allow seeds to cool. Then enjoy this tasty fall snack!!

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!

Welcome to Day #23 of our

“31 days of {Green!} Giveaways“

Today’s question: How do you “think outside the candy box”

*Attention Facebook fans: Please answer as a comment on our blog, not our Facebook page in order to be entered to win!*

Today is day #23 of our month-long, trick-or-treating party for parents!

Just knock on our door (AKA blog) each day, answer the daily question (in lieu of shouting, “Trick or treat!” – although you are totally welcome to write that as well) and you’ll be entered to win some absolutely fabulous, ever-so-eco-friendly prizes.

Today’s prize package is worth $35!

1 set of three Preserve Jr. Toothbrushes, $10 each Continental US only.

The Today I Ate A Rainbow kit gets your kids asking for fruits & veggies!  Kit contains: An interactive chart that uses colorful magnets to track daily consumption of a rainbow of fruits & veggies, a color coded shopping list and a children’s book called The Rainbow Bunch. $25  Open to Canada and the US.

Here’s how to enter:

1. Add your e-mail address to the comment login, below. (We cannot notify you if we don’t have your e-mail address!)

2. Add a comment (one per e-mail address) with your answer to the question above.

3. Comment must post before 11:59pm PST – TONIGHT

Be sure to review our giveaway rules here. Please note shipping limitations.

Be sure to subscribe to our blog and follow us on Facebook & Twitter for daily reminders & updates for the 31 Days of {Green} Giveaways promotion.

Good luck & have FUN!

(& See you tomorrow )

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.

At our daughter’s school each class has a Halloween party.  They pick four families to bring a “treat” and four families to bring something healthy!  Last year our family was asked to bring in a healthy treat for our daughter’s class party so we found this great and easy to make Vegetable Skeleton. I wasn’t sure how popular it would be up next to all the sweet treats but I was pleasantly surprised at the end of the day to see that the tray was pretty much empty…just 3 mushrooms left AND there were still plenty of cakes and cookies left uneaten!!!

Here is the picture my husband took of our veggie skeleton!

This is all it takes to make a veggie skeleton:

• Head of cabbage or iceberg lettuce
• Zucchini slices (rounds)
• Bell Pepper slices (cross-cut)
• Celery stalks
• Sugar snap peas
• Carrots (peeled)
• Broccoli florets
• Cauliflower florets
• Cherry/Grape Tomatoes
• Healthy dressing of your choice!
• Olive slices

Directions:

Step 1. Line half of small bowl with lettuce for the skeleton’s hair; fill with dressing. Place at one end of large tray or baking sheet for the skeleton’s head.

Step 2. Arrange vegetables on tray to resemble skeleton’s body

* We added the fake spiders for a little extra fun

Halloween parties can have a balance of sweets and health…by spending a little extra time you can make veggies just as fun as any junk food!

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!

In our continuing quest to try new fruits and veggies we picked up a gorgeous orange fruit that we had no clue as to what it was…even the produce guy was confused because he told us it was a persimmons but I’m pretty sure it isn’t.  We spent some time on Google trying to find it but didn’t have any luck.  So we decided to just cut it open and give it a try!  It was hard and almost crunchy to cut through!

We were really surprised to see the inside!!!!!

It looked a bit like the Kiwano fruit we tried last week so we ate them the same way!  We grabbed some with our fingertips and enjoyed the flesh around the seeds.  It tasted AMAZING…very fruity like a mix of citrus with sweet strawberry!!!  It was messy and a lot of work but it was so worth it!

If you know what this fruit is leave a comment and let us know what we ate

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!