Ella's Kitchen - The Red One Cook Book Review

We were lucky enough to be sent a copy of the Ella’s Kitchen - The Red One Cook Book to review. It is packed full of yummy ideas for making mealtimes fun for all the family!

There are over 100 recipes in this book for littlies and big kids. The instructions are simple and the emphasis is on getting children hands on and messy in the kitchen from a young age.

I love that this is more than a recipe book and also contains fun ideas and activities that get the kids involved with food other than at mealtimes. There are grow your own ideas, a fun activity to get the kids planting their own food, decorating the flower pots, watching it grow and eating the produce. Ideas for role play setting up a kids cafe, encouraging the children to use their imagination to make up their own menu and create fake food.

So far we have cooked 3 of the meals in the book. This is the Zingy Lamb and Cous Cous with Mangoes and Raisins. It was delicious!

We have also cooked Cosy Cottage Pie and Magical Moroccan-style Chicken. They were both also really tasty meals, so tasty in fact that I totally forgot to get any photos of them and they were eaten in no time!! 

We were always big fans of Ella's Kitchen while weaning Noah and so it's really great that we can continue to feel supported by them as he goes through toddlerhood. However don't think that these meals can only be eaten by toddlers as that is far from the truth, we have all enjoyed what we've made so far as a family. 

The recipes are really easy to follow and simple to make. There is nothing complicated about it and the timings are shown really clearly for each recipe, so if you know you only have half an hour then it's really easy to see which meal is more suited to the time you have to prepare that evening. We haven't tried any of the sweet recipes as yet, but they are next on the list of things to try out, I've got my eye on the Carroty Cakes, what better way to get some of that important Vitamin A.

Get your copy of Ella's Kitchen The Cook Book – The Red One here

We were sent this book free of charge. All views and opinions are my own.

Ella's Kitchen Big Taste Menu

A couple of weeks ago I went to an event hosted by Ella's Kitchen at Food at 52 and I was rather intrigued that we were going to dine on a menu whereby we would taste food the way that our babies taste it - I was promised that the flavours would be BIG!

On arriving I met the Ella's Kitchen Team including the Ella's Kitchen founder Paul Lindley and  Taste Psychologist, Chris Lukehurst. It was a fun evening where we tasted food that had it's flavours amplified in order to replicate how food can taste to babies. I learnt that babies have three times as many taste buds in their mouths as adults, thereby making them experience flavour in a much heightened way. It explains why they react so strongly to some flavours, and pull such funny faces when they taste things that are extremely bitter or sour! The Taste Psychologist pointed out that evolution is responsible for babies avoiding bitter flavours as this would have helped them to reject anything poisonous.

As part of the Big Taste Menu we tried the following:

The Red One Lolly
Brussels Sprout Ice Cream
Cheery Chicken Roast Dinner with Stuffing
Full of Sunshine Thai Curry With Lots of Veg
Cheese and Apples Munchy Biccies
Apples & Bananas Dessert

Well it was no surprise that the Brussels Sprout one was absolutely disgusting and if you wanted to see a whole room of adults pull faces then this was the place. The flavour filled my entire mouth, it was like an invasion and it just spread. I had to quickly wash it away with water - almost a whole glass. Quite understand now a babies reluctance to tuck into the green veg!

Brussels Sprouts and Strawberries!

On the flip side the Apples and Banana dessert was absolutely delicious - the bananas were like banoffi pie, so sweet and delicious, I wished my knackered adult taste buds would give me the same banana extravaganza as babies get.

Thai Curry - HOT HOT!

In between those two totally different taste experiences the Chicken Roast dinner had lots of flavours and the Thai Curry was HOT! So sometimes when us adults try some of these pre made meals we might think that they are a bit bland but it seems that this is not the case for babies, especially with their extra taste buds that fill their entire mouths.

At the end of the evening I couldn't wait to get my photo taken in this giant highchair - I was the only one!

I came away from the evening feeling a bit like I shouldn't put too much pressure on my kids if they don't eat certain things. Celebrate the victory if they at least try something was a great piece of advice that I took away from the Taste Psychologist. Also getting an insight into how children taste things so much more than we do will help me to reset my expectations of what they will eat.

The Big Taste Menu has been unveiled to the public this weekend at The Hackney Homemade Food Market this weekend and tasters will be offered free for a trial period. Ella's Kitchen are also running a great competition on their website at the moment where you can win a year's supply of Ella's food. All you have to do is upload a photo of your little one's big taste face! http://big-taste-face.ellaskitchen.co.uk/

Thanks to Ella's Kitchen for inviting me to such an enlightening evening.

Ella's Kitchen & Terracycle

Last year I blogged about Johnson's Baby Wipes teaming up with Terracyle to upcycle their packaging and Wipe Out Waste. As soon as I found out about it I started doing it immediately as I like to try and do my bit for the environment. I noticed at the time that Ella's Kitchen also recycled their packaging with Terracycle but as I didn't have a baby at that point it wasn't relevant to me. However now we've begun weaning Noah we've started collecting the Ella's Kitchen pouches to send to Terracycle. Apart from reusing the packaging (to make into bibs, pencil cases for example), for every packet you send to Terracyle they will donate 2p to a charity of your choice. 

It really is so easy to do:

- Go to http://www.terracycle.co.uk/en-UK/  and register with Terracycle
- Sign up to the Ella's Kitchen Brigade
- Enter the charity you would like Terracycle to credit
- You will get sent a pre-paid postage label to use to send off your empty packs of Baby Food Pouches.

It's also worth noting that they will accept any baby food pouches, not just Ella's Kitchen. I was lucky enough to be sent one of these great lunch tote bags when I signed up to be an Ella's Kitchen Friend 

Lovely isn't it! This is such a great initiative, so don't waste your waste, send it to Terracycle!