Drupal 7 has a reasonably messed up way of handling menus and I was unable to find a simple way of saying "starting here give me 2 levels of menu." This does that for you. It returns an array of menu items. If you've set depth to anything greater than 0 it will append these and an array to the `children` key. No authentication or validation is p…

gistfile1.txt

/**
 * Helper funtion to get an array of menu items and children.
 *
 * This returns an array of menu items with child menu items added to the
 * 'children' key.
 *
 * @param int $mlid
 *   The menu link ID we are looking at.
 * @param int $depth
 *   How deep do you want to go?
 */
function _menu_array_with_children($mlid, $depth = 0) {
  $ret = array();
  // Do we have children?
  $query = db_select('menu_links', 'ml')
    ->fields('ml')
    ->condition('plid', $mlid)
    ->orderBy('weight')
    ->execute();
  while ($child = $query->fetchAssoc()) {
    if ($depth > 0 && $child['has_children']) {
      // We want more.
      $child['children'] = ec_landing_page_nested_children($child['mlid'], $depth - 1);

    }
    $ret[] = $child;
  }
  return $ret;
}