8 Essentials for a Healthy Kitchen

Make what's good for you with these smart new kitchen tools.

Onion goggles

Do you tend to tear up while cutting onions? RSVP International Onion Goggles ($20; bigkitchen.com) have a foam seal to help prevent those irritating sulfur vapors from bothering your eyes.

Casabella Round Mesh Scrubbers

($16 for set of three; casabella.com) scour your pots and pans without wrecking them. And they're so cheerful they almost make dish-duty fun.

You don't need to pull out your clunky juicer to enjoy fresh-squeezed OJ: Just place your citrus of choice atop the Citrange Juicer ($20; momastore.org) and twist into your glass. It's low-tech, but gets the job done—the funnel filters out the seeds.

Mix up a single serving of your favorite smoothie in the Oster My Blend Blender (starting at $28; amazon.com). Simply blend in the bottle, pop on the sports lid, and you're off.

Expertly sear and brown chicken and meat inthe Cuisinart Chef's Classic Enameled Cast Iron 10-Inch Round Fry Pan ($40; cuisinart.com). Since it's enameled cast iron, you won't need much oil or butter. Plus, it's dishwasher safe.

Why cast iron?
This type of cookware is superdurable. It's also stick-resistant without containing the potentially harmful chemicalsin traditional nonstick cookware, notes Jackie Newgent, RD,author of Big Green Cookbook.

The two-in-one Kuhn Rikon Strawberry Knife Colori ($12; surlatable.com) easily scoops outthe stems of strawberries, then slices them up for healthy snacking.

Seasoning with fresh herbs adds big flavor to a dish without jacking up the calories. Make it easy on yourself: The compact Microplane Herb Mill ($20; williams-sonoma.com) minces those herbs with a flick of your wrist.

Don't you hate it when you can't get all the batter out of the bowl? Enter the Tovolo Better Batter Tool ($13; chefscatalog.com), designed to whip up properly fluffed batter and scrape the bowl clean.