I’m a sucker for fun mail and we got some recently – Kidstir sent us one of their monthly boxes, a hands-on kit to encourage cooking with kids and trying new foods.
I opened our box and found two recipes, a binder with dividers to keep our recipes in, a shopping list, a kitchen artist brush, and silly straws. (Please note: We received the welcome kit, which includes the binder for use with future recipes; boxes after the welcome kit have 3 recipes and 3 kitchen tools each.)
The welcome kit is “All About Appetizers” so our recipes were Tiny Toasts and Sip Sip Hooray!
I was pleased that Kidstir includes a shopping list for the recipes. It suggests a scavenger hunt through the kitchen for ingredients, where the kids search for them and mark them off. We had very few of the ingredients so we had to take a trip to the grocery store for things like a baguette, fresh mozzarella, blue cheese, and swiss cheese.
The Sip Sip Hooray was a quick and easy recipe. Dexter helped me squeeze some oranges. We skipped the sparkling water because I know the kids do not like carbonation, but they loved the fresh squeezed juice and it was something we hadn’t tried before.
We spent a lot more time on the Tiny Toasts recipe. First I gathered all of our ingredients. The recipe explained how to make three types of Tiny Toast, but also listed several alternatives for toppings. I chose three types that I thought would be new to the boys, but things they would be open to trying: Caprese Crostini; pear, blue cheese, & honey; and swiss cheese and bacon.
I cut the baguette and the boys helped me arrange them on a cooking sheet and then brush olive oil onto each piece.
We baked our bread and put all the ingredients on the table before dinner so everyone could make their own Tiny Toast appetizers.
Dexter, my picky child, enjoyed the bacon and swiss the most (sigh…), but came REALLY close to trying the Caprese when we explained to him it was like pizza. Cooper was willing to try everything, but finally decided he like pear and honey (with just a teeny bit of blue cheese) the best. Campbell ate as much bacon as we let him.
Here’s our finished product:
Ultimately, we had a lot of fun with Kidstir, but it would probably not be a subscription service that would work well for my family. I wasn’t sure that it would be worth the $19.95 price tag to me and it was more expensive because we wound up needed to shop for a lot of the ingredients. However, it did inspire us to try making some recipes together that we probably wouldn’t have done otherwise. I think this would be a good box for a “foodie” family that is looking for more things to try and would be likely to have more of the ingredients on hand, or for a family looking for some inspiration or encouragement food-wise.
