Reviewed by
Roxie
Foodini Club is an award-winning cooking club for budding young chefs ages 3-12. Every month, a food exploration kit is delivered to your door. Each pack is full of wonderful ideas, information and ingredients to get your little ones exploring, making, baking and creating in the kitchen.
This month Penny and I received all the dry ingredients to make two recipes: Jumblaya & Corn Drops (veggie rice & corn pancakes) and Summer Brownies (aubergine brownies). The pack also contains shopping lists, an arts & crafts activity, recipes cards, a ‘Kitchen Skills 101’ card and a sachet from the ‘Botanical Badger’ with contained a herb to help season your dishes. This month it was bay leaves.
My little girl is 4, so does she require a lot of help and supervision (although she impresses me every time with her knowledge about food and where it comes from) but I don’t mind because I love having the opportunity to spend some quality time with her. It’s so easy just to pop on the TV or let her sit with her tablet, Foodini Club gets her moving, thinking and learning. Older children will love taking the lead as the steps are easy to follow.
Our pack contained: two recipe cards, two shopping lists, the ‘Botanical Badger Guide to Bay Leaves’, a ‘Kitchen Skills 101’ card about how to prepare fresh tomatoes, a ‘Summer Mosaics’ activity card, a bag with lentils, grains & rice; chocolate chips; dates, a spice and herbs sachet containing oregano, paprika & thyme; a bag containing oat flour, ground almonds, cacao powder & bicarb and another containing polenta, oat flour and salt…
Jumblaya & Corn Drops
This recipe involved a lot of preparation in advance so it’s one that we took little breaks from and came back to all day. It took a lot longer than the recommended prep time of 20 minutes, however, it’s nice to not feel pressured in the kitchen and take the time to let Penny experiment. As she’s such a fussy eater, there is also a bigger chance she’ll eat something new and healthy for dinner if she’s taken the time to prepare it. She’s always so proud of her Foodini Club creations.
Penny really enjoyed using her ‘big girl knife’ to cut out all the veggies. She found it frustrating at times but kept persevering which was fantastic to see. There was a wide range of vegetables in this recipe, some of which she had never seen before.
Summer Brownies
It’s always exciting when there is a huge bag of chocolate in our pack! The ingredients provided are always the best quality too. The trickiest part of this recipe was peeling the skin from the baked aubergine. This was definitely a step that required a lot of adult involvement, however, the rest of the recipe was very straightforward and one we would definetly recreate ourselves. The aubergine made the brownies extra soft and moist. Whilst our brownies were baking Penny had lots of fun using the mixed lentils, beans and grains provided to create a sunflower mosaic.
By Mary 
By Evelyn 
