For today's installment in our series of five 2009 holiday gift guides, we'd like to focus on an area that is near and dear to our heart, and one some folks might think of as two entirely different things: Kitchen gear, cookbooks, and other products to help you and your young child enjoy cooking together, and pretend play items that help kids pretend they are already master chefs. In our experience, the two run together seamlessly if you let them, and an enthusiasm for one will feed an engagement with the other. So we've collected twelve of our favorite items here that cover that spectrum - from products that will fascinate and engage your child's attention while playing in the kitchen while you cook, to products to engage kids from ages 3 to 8 or so with actual cooking, to toys that can help ensure that they regularly engage with the idea of preparing and serving fresh, healthy food. Bon appetit, or as we so enjoyed saying during a brief residence in Holland, eet smaakelijk ("ate smack-a-luck")!


Round cookie-cutter set: No animal shapes can beat an exhaustive set of sized round cookie and dough cutters, and your drawer space will thank you, too. These are also great for making pretend cookies out of play dough - an invaluable "pretend" cooking activity. | $15, Amazon.com

DIY spice smelling and tasting set: Buy a dozen or so acrylic magnifying boxes ($1.50 each, $5 shipping) and an unfinished cigar box ($4). Use non-irritating spices from your own spice rack, supplemented, if desired, with additional spices from your local grocery store. Select spices with dramatically different smells, spices with familiar smells, spices with varying textures, and spices in their whole form (cinnamon bark, cardamom, star anise, vanilla bean), cutting any larger items into segments small enough to fit in one of the 1"x1" boxes. Place in the cigar box, glue in a folded cardboard spacer if desired to fill up any unused space lengthwise, widthwise, or both, and either label it yourself or save that for a fun activity with the kid. Suitable for children ages 3 and up. | About $30, various sources


LillyBean play food: The best felt play food we've found. | $5 and up, LillyBeanMarket.com


Mollie Katzen's kids' cookbooks: The best cookbook series for prescoolers we've ever seen. Pretend Soup, Salad People - anything by Mollie Katzen written for kids is great. Not only are the recipes simple, flavorful, and fun for kids - many, many kids' cookbooks achieve that goal - but the recipes' directions are largely image-based, almost like comics, so kids can follow them much more independently. | $12-$15, Amazon.com | ZRecs review


Imagiplay Veggie Cutting Set: We love Imagiplay's version of "cuttable" fruit and vegetables. They're similar to those made by Melissa & Doug, but we trust their paint sourcing better than Melissa & Doug's, which we have some questions about. Imagiplay also use sustainable rubber wood for their toys. | $25, Imagiplay

Handstand Kids cookbooks: Handstand Kids makes great regional cuisine cookbooks suitable for kids from ages 5 or 6 to 9 or 10. We've used and enjoyed their Mexican Cookbook and Italian Cookbook, and each cookbook in the series comes in a "pizza box" package with a kids' chef hat, which Z wears at every opportunity. | $25, Amazon.com


Green Toys Cooking & Dining Set: Green Toys' excellent Cooking and Dining set includes a stock pot and lid, a skillet, four plates, four bowls, four cups, and four sets of knives, forks, and spoons, all made of 100% recycled plastic milk jugs. Green Toys has also split the set into two smaller sets this year, a Dish Set and Chef Set, | $30, Amazon.com | ZRecs review


Hand beater: Forget little whisks. Hand egg beaters are where it's at - easier for kids to use, fun to turn, and downright fascinating to watch. Let your child mix any liquids that needs mixing, and don't be surprised when they ask to play with it when there's nothing to cook. Best under supervision until age 4 or so, then all systems go. | $11, Amazon.com


The Manga Cookbook: Japanese cooking in a kid-friendly format. A magical way to get jaded preteens and teenagers back into the kitchen with challenging, interesting food presented in a format they can latch onto. Our teenage cousin gave it two thumbs up. | $11, Amazon.com


Yummyfun Kooking: The world's best cooking show for kids. Think Pee Wee's Playhouse in the kitchen, with a host that will not annoy anyone. Must be seen to be believed.| $15, Amazon.com | ZRecs review


Tovolo ice cream sandwich molds: As if ice cream sandwiches needed to be made any more fun. We've used these, they work great. They also offer a Christmas set. | $12, Amazon.com


Aeromax Chef Suit: We have handled Aeromax dress-up outfits extensively at trade shows in multiple years, and have always been impressed with their quality. Aeromax's chef outfit is a great way to encourage kids' pretend play in a play kitchen and to put on for real cooking as well. | $40, Amazon.com

Looking for more gift ideas? Check out our other holiday gift guides, including our 2008 gift guides, which feature about 90% unique and 100% relevant recommendations, in the links at the foot of this post (on our website, RSS and email folks).

All of the items in this gift guide are either things we have owned for a long time, or things we have handled at trade shows and did not receive samples of. We hope you have discovered something your child will love!

The high level of consumer expertise and inquisitiveness is one of our favorite things about regular ZRecs readers, and we've been reading into the Amazon purchases you make through our sites for a while now as a partial guide to what baby gear, sippy cups, kids' toys and books, and BPA-free water bottles you're thinking about, investing in, and willing to take a chance on. We realized recently that if we are able to learn so much from how our readers vote with their dollars, you could too - and we could learn more by asking you what you thought of these items now that you've tried them out.

That's the idea behind You Bought It, a new feature on ZRecs where we'll browse through the statistics of Amazon purchases made through ZRecs sites and invite readers who picked up some interesting items to discuss them. We'll highlight most-purchased items, products with strengths or weaknesses that seem to make or break products for some parents, and unusual items we only discovered thanks to your purchases.

In case it even needs to be said, all of the data we have on shopping through our links is completely anonymous. We have no idea who might have purchased what, or even what was purchased in combination with other items. Amazon works very hard to protect your privacy - what they maintain for us is a spreadsheet of what was purchased through our links. The sales of products through our sites helps fund our consumer research, advocacy, and independent product reviewing here on Z Recommends (as well as funding the care and feeding of our other blogs and the ZRecs Guide to Safer Children's Products) - without it, we honestly wouldn't be able to do what we do. So this is as good a time as any to say - although we try to say it often - "Thanks!"

For this first round, we'll cover the period from June 1 until yesterday - a period which, for the sake of context, covers 1,095 items shipped. Further installments of You Bought It will cover about a month at a time.

Sippy Cups, Straw Cups, and Adult Water Bottles

More than anything else in the past few months, readers picked up sippy cups, straw cups, and water bottles. Here are some hard numbers.

Spending of ZRecs readers and passers-by on sippy and straw cups tends to cluster around some brands that are probably a bit less widely available, giving them a boost over the biggest national brands. (At least, that's what we tell ourselves about the fact that so few of you snapped up the Contigo AutoSeal, or the Playtex Insulator Straw Cup, through our Amazon links.) But the way that spending is distributed is pretty interesting anyway, in light of the recommendations we've made in this summer's Sippy Cup Showdowns.

Here's the breakdown of the top seven sippy and straw cups we saw the most activity for in that period:

• Tilty: 28 two-packs, or 56 cups, at $2.50-$5 per cup


• Innate MeMe: 22 sippys at $17 per cup


• Thermos Foogo Sippy Cup: 10 sippys at $16-$17 per cup


• Thermos Foogo Straw Cup: 7 straw cups at $12-$18 per cup


• Thinkbaby: 14 sippys at $9 per cup


• Munchkin Mighty Grip Flip-Top Straw Cup: 12 (in singles or two-packs), at $4-$8 per cup


• KidBasix Safe Sippy: 8 sippys, at $13-$15 per cup


• Nalgene Grip-n-Gulp: 8 sippys, at $7-$11 per cup

All of these but the Foogo and Safe Sippy were Top Picks in our Infant to Toddler or Toddler to Pre-K Sippy and Straw Cup Showdowns, and each of those middle-tier picks were voted up for inclusion in the Top Picks in our end-of-round reader polls.

What we most want to know is: How do all you Tilty shoppers like your super-cool, super cheap new sippy cups? Any complaints or surprises? Or are you as thrilled about them as we are?

By the way, at least a few of you also liked the look of the Rubbermaid Litterless Juice Box, which we named the World's Worst Straw Cup - 5 of those sold, too, a reflection of the disagreement among readers over our assessment of it. This is what they mean when they say "any publicity is good publicity," and why companies are still willing to send us products to review even though we don't promise to say only nice things.

For adult water bottles, the score was Camelbak 28 (for the BPA-Free Better Bottles - gotta love that bite valve - and Performance Bottles, with prices ranging from $8-$14 apiece), Thinksport 25 (a double-walled, fantastically-insulating, tank of a stainless steel sport bottle, selling for $16-$18 apiece) and Nalgene 8 (for their Tritan OTG bottles and wide-mouth bottles, $10-$12 apiece). A few of you bought Nathan stainless steel straw bottles, which we've never written about.

A couple of you bought these "Insta-Sip" screw-on sippy adapters for bottled water bottles. We were scratching our heads when we arrived at the product's page on Amazon and saw that fully half of Amazon shoppers who viewed these purchased them at $15 for two little sippy lids instead of the item suggested below the product image, a $3 alternative by Gerber. Then we realized the reason was probably because the Insta-Sip is labeled on Amazon in the product details as containing no polycarbonate plastic (and thus, presumably, being BPA-free) while the Gerber product description was silent on the issue.

This is typical of Gerber's unilaterally asleep-at-the-wheel behavior when it comes to providing definitive, trustworthy information regarding the BPA status of their products. (In case you were wondering why the vast majority of the many Gerber sippy and straw cups on the market were absent from our Sippy and Straw Cup Showdowns, well, every time we call customer service they tell us something different, and no one else there will talk to us.) Memo to Gerber: The fact that a product priced at five times what you charge for a similar item is matching you on sales is proof that you are HEMORRHAGING MONEY by acting like no one has ever heard about BPA. Genie, bottle, out. Join us.

Other Stuff You Bought The Most

It shouldn't surprise any long-term readers of Z Recommends or users of the ZRecs Guide that our readers buy a lot of children's feeding items. Munchie Mugs, Boon Snack Balls, and BabyBjorn plate and spoon sets are all items we love that were frequently purchased. The Munchie Mug is the best toddler-accessible snack carrier we've ever used, the Snack Ball is the most fun and whimsical, and the BabyBjorn plate has a great design for making it easier for kids to self feed, thanks to its genuinely non-skid base and unique shape. We saw a handful of each of these items purchased in the last couple months.

If any of you BabyBjorn plate users haven't noticed yet, the white part of the bowl pops out of the base for cleaning. It took us a while to figure that out!

We also saw purchases of several Booginhead SippiGrips, which we had never seen before. The SippiGrip is a sippy cup tether (seen plenty of those) but for some reason these things sell. My question - for any of you who purchased these, or have used them - it promises that it has a "unique grip material," but does it work as advertised? Any chance it makes your child throw their cup more - and can they haul it back up themselves once they've done so? Inquiring minds want to know.

Several of you also picked up Munchkin snack catchers, which we've never reviewed but always planned to, because we really dislike them. (We did give it two stars in the ZRecs Guide, but a video of its failings would be much more illuminating.) So if you have one of these, tell us - do you like it? If you do, have you had it for long, washed it many times? We've found that the petals that are supposed to hold snacks in quickly lose a bit of their shape, and that it then leaks crumbs and even small snack items like nobody's business. How about you?

Several of you haven't forgotten about the Green Toys Tea Set, either, which is one of our favorite recycled plastic toys. If you have a cute photo of your child playing with yours, send it to us and we'll publish it (and link to your blog, if you have one). We'd love to hear what you and your child think of it, but we're pretty sure you love it too, right down to the packaging.

The Most Expensive Stuff You Bought

Three of you bought Avent Steam Sterilizers, which was an interesting outlier - no one bought any other bottle sterilizer by any other brand through ZRecs during that time. What's up with that? Is it because it's well-discounted, or was there some other motivating factor?

Ninety-four of you (!) bought 30-minute Flip digital video camcorders when they were on sale for $50-$60. Either that, or some of you bought more than one. Given the absurdly low sale price you paid for it, how do you like it?

Several of you bought Hamilton Beach food processors after we identified their BPA status; this food processor was the most popular, and is frequently on sale for around 25% off. We had never (and still have never) used Hamilton Beach products, so we'd really like to know: If you bought this, how has it performed?

ZRecs visitors also dropped some Benjamins on a Beaba Babycook, which we are currently testing for review; a few BabyBjorn Travel Cribs, which we loved but balked at the price of; and several Britax car seats - a Roundabout and two Boulevards. (Compare this with 18 Britax seat sales we tracked during their last semi-annual sale, and a bunch of Frontiers that sold after our in-depth comparison between it and its competition.) Any thoughts on these, users of very nice expensive products?

Interesting Baby Gear, Toys, Books, and Music You Bought

We'll skip the random items you added to your shopping carts to get free shipping or the really nice things that are totally non-kid-related that you clearly purchased through ZRecs to help give us a boost (thanks for that, by the way) and focus on a few on-topic purchases that caught our eye.

A couple of you picked up KidCo Adhesive Mount Magnet Locks, just the kind of product that usually makes our eyes glaze over. But these are a really great idea, a step above the kinds of cabinet locks we used with Z. A few reviews on Amazon seemed frustratingly surprised by the lack of keys in the set (yes, you have to buy the keys and locks separately) but I suspect the reason for this is that you just keep a couple of the keys around and use them for all the locks, which means you'd want to buy the locks separately. So if you bought or have used these, we really want to know: Do these work as well as you'd hoped?

Plan Toys has a really cute toddler pounding toy (they call it the Punch and Drop), with balls you knock into a box, and a couple of you purchased it, although we had never mentioned it.

We love almost every Plan Toy product we've handled (with one disappointing exception). The natural dyes they use, the way they sand stuff down, and the way they incorporate any other materials needed to enhance a product - in the case of this wooden toy, it looks like they have plastic or rubber seals that give the balls a resting place and provide some friction for pounding - is really top-notch. This design in particular makes a lot more sense than the wood-on-wood pounding of standard tool-bench style pounders - it's just so hard to get the wooden pegs and holes to match up at just the point of friction, and then they swell or shrink in different climates. We like the look of this toy almost as much as we like Plan Toys' Hammer Balls set, which is truly the standard-setter for this type of toy as far a we're concerned.

Someone also bought Plan Toys' Shape and Sort It Out set, which looks like a really nice version of a cheap Melissa & Doug version of the toy we had when Z was an infant and toddler.

A few of you are still buying Fred Party People Chopsticks, which we found to be one of the better inexpensive options for chopsticks for children in our Toddler Chopstick Showdown - a six-pack costs about $10. And a few of you have been picking up rattles from Sassy's cute, relatively new Earth Brights line, like this one. We like the way they're combining brightly-colored fabrics and wood in some of these infant toy designs.

You picked up some interesting books for your own perusal, including Home Comforts (our own family's favorite go-to guide for "the art and science of keeping house"), the intriguing The Complete Organic Pregnancy, The Top 100 Baby Purees, a nice alternative to the standard baby food cookbook, and A Child's Garden, a book offering "60 ideas to make any garden come alive for children." Somebody got a great-looking Eric Carle growth chart.

As for kids' books, we love poring over our sales summaries because our readers help us find great kids' books all the time. First, though, a couple we recommended seemed to go over well: Several of you bought Margaret Wise Brown and Leonard Weisgard's seminal The Important Book or Wendy Pfeffer and Robin Brickman's astonishing, beautiful A Log's Life - the former after we mentioned it as one of our Ten Favorite Kids' Books (you should check out the rest!), and the latter likely because we wrote that "there really isn't a more beautiful introduction to life cycles, food webs, and ecological niches than this lovely book." If you did buy either of these, tell us: Do you and your children love it as much as we do?

Several of you jumped at the chance to buy books in Jessica Spanyol's Minibugs series after we reviewed one earlier this week, or one of you bought every single one. Are they what you expected, based on our review?

Speaking of seminal, if there is any child who does not need ready access to The Monster At the End of This Book, which several of you bought in the past couple months, it is really the single most important Sesame Street book you could buy for $5. Michael Smollin's illustrations are fabulous and the story is a crack-up for anyone who has ever been afraid of anything, or wished that a character inside a book would try to destroy it.

Books you bought that we hadn't known about include the Skippyjon Jones books, which we are pretty sure Z is going to flip out over, and Arnold Lobel's Mouse Tales on CD. Lobel is a great reader of his own stories (we own his Frog and Toad stories on CD) and it was cool to discover this one too, which we'll probably spring for if it isn't at our local library. You also bought What's Alive?, one of so many well-conceived and surprising books in the Let's-Read-And-Find-Out Science series that we must, must, must get our own hands on. Seriously, we should own stock in this publisher.

ZRecs readers are big, big fans of Putumayo Kids CDs. The music series is good enough that if you have heard any, you are probably a fan too.

If You Bought It: What Did You Think Of It?

One of the best things about the community of readers that has developed around Z Recommends is their interest in sharing the pros and cons of kids' stuff they've tried. So if you own any of the products above, tell us what you think of them! We'll collect some of the most interesting feedback we get and highlight it in a later post, or even quote you in the ZRecs Guide listing for the product, where we're working on adding opinions on the products we cover from several additional sources. So browse the post above and take a moment to give us your two cents on products your fellow readers are probably thinking about buying right now! (If you're reading this post in your email or an RSS reader, click here to visit the post and comment.)

Like what you read on Z Recommends? You can have posts delivered for free every day via RSS or email, as well as occasional summaries of our links to other blogs, news articles, and websites from our Delicious feed (our alternative to published link roundups). If you're already a subscriber, please click through to this post if you like it, to let us know you'd like to see more content like this.

We've spent the last month or so looking into the status of BPA, PVC and phthalates in food processors and blenders to add them to the ZRecs Guide. The kitchen appliance industry seems to be a year or more behind the baby product industry in its awareness of plastics concerns and their ability to access and share information about the materials they use. Some company reps expressed confusion about ingredients present in plastics, making numerous misstatements about plastic types and their own products, and one company's customer service reps didn't know what BPA, PVC or phthalates are. It was very reminiscent of the earliest calls we made to baby bottle companies a couple of years ago.

Thankfully, we're trained for this. After multiple cold calls, store checks to cross-reference any stamps or markings on the plastic parts of each company's products, and discussions with high-level representatives at most of the companies below, we have collected enough information to warrant a post outlining the relative chemical safety of the U.S. food processor and blender market.

Each of the brands below have been added to the ZRecs Guide to Safer Children's Products, where findings can be filtered by what type of chemicals you'd like to avoid and what we call a "Confidence Rating."

ZRecs Guide listings are flagged with Chemicals of Concern - substances that may be present in the products - along with a Confidence Rating denoting our level of confidence in that particular chemical profile. A Confidence Rating of "low" means that we do not have much faith that we have the whole story - a product might not contain the Chemical of Concern it has been flagged with, or might contain others; a Confidence Rating of "high" means that we are highly confident we know the whole story, and would be quite surprised to learn otherwise.

As you'll see here, depending on your priorities and your planned use of the products below, you may need to make some compromises. But with the information in hand, those compromises are within your control. We hope it's helpful to you!

Beaba

The Beaba BabyCook is BPA, PVC, and phthalate-free. We wrote about this product's story a while ago.

Cuisinart

Cuisinart's large food processor bowls are made of Lexan, a brand-name polycarbonate, and contain BPA.

Cuisinart customer service representatives initially told ZRecs that the hard, clear plastic bowls and lids of products such as the food grinder and mini food processors are made with polypropylene, but the company's public relations department refused to confirm this, told us that the customer service department "shouldn't have said that," and would not state whether the products contain BPA. The bowls and lids of this product, labeled number 7 (and "other" plastics category which includes polycarbonate), appear to be made of polycarbonate plastic; this would be consistent with Cuisinart's larger food processors, many of which are labeled as being made of Lexan (the "brand-name" version of polycarbonate). Alternately, they may be made of SAN (a styrene).

Cuisinart's blender jars are made of glass; lids are labeled "#7," although this seems unlikely to be polycarbonate. Cuisinart will not state what plastic type the blender blade base is made from or whether any parts contain BPA, PVC, or phthalates. The food processor bowl and lid included with some of their blenders are made of SAN and are unlikely to contain BPA.

Hamilton Beach/Proctor-Silex

Hamilton Beach's PR rep was one of the best we've worked with, a clear contrast to Cuisinart's confused and confusing public relations strategy. She worked quickly and efficiently to get us the information we needed, and did not hesitate to tell us which parts of their products are made of BPA-containing polycarbonate, knowing full well that this would be considered a negative feature by our readers. This is the kind of company we like to deal with, both professionally in our blogging, and as consumers.

Officials at Hamilton Beach stated that the blade attachment for both the glass and plastic blender jars is made of polycarbonate. Depending on the model, the lid is made of either polypropylene or PVC; lids which are made of PVC do contain phthalates.

Hamilton Beach and Proctor-Silex food processors and food choppers are made of SAN and POM or ABS. (All of these materials are believed to be BPA- and phthalate-free.)

We have updated information on the chemicals in Hamilton Beach products in this follow-up post.

KitchenAid

All Kitchenaid food processors have bowls and lids made of polycarbonate, and thus contain BPA. Glass blender jars have been discontinued; current blender jars are also made of polycarbonate. Blender lids are made from PVC, but company representatives stated they did not know whether this PVC contained phthalates. For what it's worth, it is likely that they do.

Vita-Mix

The new model of the Vita-Mix blender, the 5200, is BPA-, PVC-, and phthalate-free. The jar is made of Tritan copolymer, the new plastic Nalgene and others are using for hard plastic sports bottles. You can purchase it from Vita-Mix's website. Please note that all other Vita-Mix blenders have polycarbonate jars, and thus contain BPA.

A lot of information, we know. We have two ways for you to cut through all of this information and find a product that's right for you. One is the ZRecs Guide itself - just select your product area or brand and you can drill down into our listings to find the best matches for your family.

The other is a slate of quick recommendations, which you'll find below. (We're still seeking information about Black & Decker and Oster blenders and food processors; we've placed repeated calls to Oster COO James Lille and are waiting on Black & Decker to pass back information from their R&D department. So you won't find either of those brands represented here.)

Recommendations: Blenders

If you can afford a $500 blender, by all means buy the Vita-Mix 5200. It's a top-of-the-line blender that can handle whole grains and whole plant foods and get the most nutrition out of them, and thus does a lot of the work a food processor can do if you like your food pureed.

Otherwise, we'd recommend the Hamilton Beach's Wave Power Plus blender, and advise against using it for hot foods (use a good immersion blender instead). Wash the plastic parts by hand (the blade attachment and lid) and you should be minimizing exposure to the BPA and phthalates present in this product. Avoid some of the cheaper Hamilton Beach blenders which, like most cheap blenders across brands, get poor reviews.

Recommendations: Food processors

For food processors, Hamilton Beach offers a welcome shift in both openness and materials safety compared with Cuisinart and Kitchenaid. All Hamilton Beach and Proctor-Silex food processors and food choppers are believed to be BPA-, pthalate-, and PVC-free, as they contain no food-contact PVC or polycarbonate parts. We recommend Hamilton Beach's Big Mouth Food Processors, which get predominantly positive reviews in high numbers on Amazon.com; these food processors retail at $100-$150, but are on sale for about $65-$95 at the moment.

If you're interested in a multi-functional device for preparing homemade baby food, the Beaba Babycook has received high marks from ZRecs readers as well as reviewers on other sites.

Update: A reader comment brings up another great product we should note here. We haven't yet collected data across brands for immersion blenders, but we did get details on the plastics used in the Bosch Mixxo when we were offered one for consideration for the Tranquil Parent Gift Guide late last year. The Bosch Mixxo is a rechargeable immersion blender that comes with an interchangeable mini food processor. It has a charging station for your counter that holds both the top motor part and the stainless steel immersion stick. It also comes with a pitcher for making smoothies or blending other things and lids for both the pitcher and the food processor bowl. It has a safety lock for blending to protect your fingers. Bosch representatives told us that the Mixxo uses no polycarbonate or PVC in food contact parts and is thus free of BPA and phthalates. (The clear plastic parts are styrene.) Some other immersion blenders may be free of these chemicals - we just haven't taken on that research area yet - but we do know the Mixxo is a great product, and recommend it if an immersion blender suits your needs. It runs about $100 on Amazon.com.

Questions?

Check out the full Food Prep section of the ZRecs Guide here, and let us know if you have any questions!