Garden Grown Nuggets

Did you hear the good news?  Peas of Mind is now offering a NEW product! We have added Garden Grown Nuggets to our delicious and nutritious line of frozen food for kids.  Here at Peas of Mind, we reinvent the classics! We take those unhealthy dishes kids love and make a nutritious version the whole family will enjoy. 

This time last year we thought to ourselves: what are we missing in our line of frozen snacks and meals for kids? We have our Peas of Pie pizza which is loaded with veggies (that are unseen to the veggie-phobic eye.)  We turned nutrient rich vegetables (like carrots, broccoli and cauliflower) into guilt-free French fries. And we have even infused fresh baked pull-a-part bread with a full dose of veggies.  What classic kid food are we missing?  

Then it hit us like a ton of broccoli florets: NUGGETS!  I’m sure you can attest that your kids LOVE nuggets and we have realized that those darn things just aren’t going away.  So we started the process of reinventing this fried, saturated fat-filled chicken nugget by turning it into a garden-grown nugget that both moms AND kids will love.

We spent hours in the test kitchens whipping up different versions of our all-natural nugget until we had a version that truly gave us Peas of Mind.  This perfectly peas-full nugget is loaded with broccoli, carrots, tofu and brown rice, making it both vegetarian and gluten-free.  We then decided to give our customers more choices and came up with three flavors: Original, BBQ (which are both VEGAN) and Cheesy!  One serving of our Garden Grown Nuggets is:

• packed with vitamins and minerals
• has less sodium then the leading brands
• contains one FULL serving of veggies 
• includes 7 grams of complete protein 
• gluten free
• lower in fat than the leading brands

So get ready to devour the first gluten-free and vegan nugget! They will be on shelves of Super Target in May, in Sprouts Farmers Market in June and on their way to a shelf near you soon! (Find them in the freezer section)

Peas of Mind's complete product line

Inspirational Gardens: Edible Landscaping

We love eating fresh and healthy and what better way to do that than to eat locally grown? How about as local as your backyard or even your living room? We love the idea of edible landscaping, planting fruit and vegetable trees and plants in any space where a purely decorative plant would typically be used. Here are a few favorites we've come across:

Living Apple Tree Fence
Kendall Jackson Winery in Sonoma County, CA has a fabulous English garden. Among the highlights is a remarkable fence composed of several dozen living apple trees. The trees were trained/trellised/manipulated so that their trunks grew perfectly straight up and their branches straight out (parellell to the ground) while in a single plane. Now, after at least a decade, this living, breathing fence is a bold and clever statement, amazingly and intriguingly functional, and makes for incredibly easy harvesting. (The apples grow in a tidy row along the straightened branches). What a conversation piece. And talk about sustainable!

(photo from University of Missouri: find directions on how to construct your own apple tree fence on their site: http://extension.missouri.edu/publications/DisplayPub.aspx?P=G6024)

Another memorable part of their garden was the wine sensory-themed gardens. Here, the aromas commonly found in specific wines are grouped together for an interactive wine tasting + garden tour experience. Gardens can be beautiful, and tasty!

(from Kendall Jackson's website: www.kj.com)

Four Cherry Trees in One

A professor of mine in college had a cherry tree in his backyard from the Pomology department (study of fruit trees). This was no ordinary cherry tree; it produced four completely different types of cherries all on one tree. The types of cherries were selected so that one made fruit early in the season, another made fruit late in the season, another type made cherries that were great for making pies and jam, etc. Instead of have an overabundance of one kind of cherry packed into 2 weeks time, his tree yielded various kinds of cherries spread over the course of more than 2 months!

How did the students create this special tree? They used a hundred-year old technique called grafting where a branch of one tree or vine is attached to (and becomes part of) another species of tree or vine. Think of it as an organ donation for plants. Like organ donation in humans, the donor and recipient must have a similar genetic make up for the procedure to be successful; grafting a branch from one cherry tree with another cherry tree would have a higher success rate than grafting a branch of a cherry tree onto a banana tree.

If you have room in your backyard for a single tree, why not plant one that makes not one but many varieties of fruit for you and your family to eat?

The White House Organic Garden

The White House Organic Garden is a prime example of edible landscaping that we love. What hasn't already been said about the fantastic example the First Lady is setting for families across the country.

(photo from the The Baltimore Sun)