Earlier this month, we were really excited to be asked to take part in Wren Kitchen’s campaign to Take Back The Kitchen, an initiative aimed at getting families back in the kitchen eating healthy, home-cooked food.
I was sent their Little Kitchen Big Ideas cookbook, which contains easy, healthy recipes that appeal to kids and adults alike, with the aim of getting little ones more involved in cooking, baking, and, most importantly, eating the good stuff!
Unfortunately, while our little one may turn out to be an excellent cook in the future, at 11 months old she isn’t really able to help out too much. There are some wonderful ideas in the cookbook for getting little cooks involved, but we were still able to use the recipes to create a few meals designed especially to appeal to little people.
The first recipe I tried provided a fantastic way to let my little girl enjoy one of our ‘favourite’ dishes in a healthier way. It was a tortilla pizza, which was cheap to make, quick to make, and came out the oven looking exactly like a restaurant-quality pizza. This was a real success for us and our little girl loved it, particularly the fried egg in the middle (she’s recently been a bit selective about fried eggs so it was nice that she guzzled this one down). I will definitely be making this again in the future. As she gets older, she can definitely help me make this as well, choosing toppings to help her to make informed choices over what she eats, and generally just mucking in when it comes to the kitchen.
Moving on to encouraging fruit at breakfast time and a recipe for ‘Jude’s Pancakes’. Our little girl already loves pancakes, but this recipe made them fluffy with the addition of baking powder. I added blueberries into the pancake batter to add a new dimension of flavour. This encouraged our little girl to enjoy the benefits of this superfood in a new way. I liked how this dish was made sweet thanks to natural ingredients rather than artificial sugars. On a personal level, I still prefer thin pancakes, but again this is a fantastic dish to make alongside little ones as they get a bit older.
The final dish I made from the cookbook was arguably the least child-involved but the most baby-led weaning friendly. The courgette and potato tots focused on some great vegetable ingredients, transforming them into an interesting dish for little ones to enjoy.
It was really good for us to push courgettes and also to incorporate more cow’s milk in our little girl’s diet through the use of a yoghurt dip.
The tots themselves required very little work to create (draining the courgette of water wasn’t the most glorious of tasks though!) and came in handy sizes for little hands to grab hold of and enjoy.
Disclaimer: We were sent a supermarket voucher to cover the cost of our ingredients in order to take part in this project. For more information on Wren Kitchens’ campaign, check out their Little Kitchen Hub.