We received the boxes shown below to facilitate our review. And that’s my referral link you’ll find below. But of course, as always, all opinions expressed here are entirely ours.
My kids love this! What’s “this,” you ask? Kidstir – a subscription box for kids, built around cooking. The welcome kit includes an empty cookbook binder. Each month thereafter, subscribers receive a couple new recipes and a few goodies to go with them. For instance, this box contained a strawberry grow kit, silicone muffin liners, and a couple tiny jars of preserves to go with the scones we got the recipes for.
My kids think it’s awesome because they get to cook. And I think it’s awesome because it uses actual ingredients (all from-scratch cooking here – no box mixes!) with an emphasis on the food, so I can naturally, easily teach my kids about nutrition.
The Welcome Kit
Here’s a closer look at the Welcome Kit. This is what it looks like when you first open it up.
Upon digging in a bit, you see this:
(That is a basting brush to aid in making the Tiny Toasts, and some fun paper straws and doodads to go on them for the fun Orange Fizz recipe.)
Breakfast Box
Then on to Kidstir box #2. This one is all about breakfast!
You might be able to tell from the inner label that there are three basic recipe focii (?) here: Strawberry Breakfast Parfait, Egg-cellent Cupcakes (mini quiches), and Sunny Scones.
(You saw the closeup of this box’s contents at the top of the post.)
The box includes the recipes and related pages, of course. It also includes a strawberry grow kit to grow your own strawberries for the parfaits, silicone muffin liners for the quiches, and jams to top the Silly Scones.
There’s a lot more to these pages than just the recipes! There are cooking/serving tips. This set, for instance, also includes instructions for frying an egg (in a variety of ways), ideas for using muffin liners (besides the obvious!), and tips for choosing good strawberries. There is science/nutrition information, like the brief berry information included here and the suggested activity for taste-testing a variety of berries, and the page that challenges kids to note where their ingredients originated. (Like that eggs come from chickens. This might seem obvious, but you’d be amazed at how many children – and adults, for that matter – have no clue where their food really comes from.) And there is basic “cooking skills” information.
Sunny Scones
The Sunny Scones are the first thing my daughters tried. And, I’ll be honest, they had a bit of a goof. See, I’ve been gluten-free for 3+ years now, and they’ve gotten accustomed to cooking without wheat flour. So when they dove into this project in the next room without me, they started their scones with rice flour. Oops.
When I realized, we added some psyllium to the mix (about 1 Tbsp., if I recall correctly), and the scones were a bit tender, but worked okay. (I think they would have been easier to work with had they been made with the original all-purpose flour!) The girls said they tasted pretty good, too, while they were warm, but once they’d cooled they were kind of “meh.” (Rice flour is not known for its great flavor in baked goods!)
(That was all the help they needed from me, by the way. Of course I was around to oversee the oven. But I didn’t have to “intervene” at all except to help them correct their flour error.)
Out of curiosity, once they were finished, I tried the scones with almond flour (because at the moment I’m supposed to be grain-free as well as gluten-free). The dough was very wet – next time I’d reduce the liquid – and they were pretty tender and a bit salty. But they worked. So this seems to be a pretty foolproof recipe. (I mean, if we can mess around with it that much and the scones still turn out…that’s a pretty solid recipe!)
Are there any downsides to Kidstir?
Well, I’d love to see it use whole foods (like whole wheat flour instead of all-purpose) but, frankly, most people won’t have those ingredients around. And those of us who do probably know enough about cooking to make the adjustments on the fly and teach our children to do the same. So not a huge deal, there.
If you have a lot of kids, you might end up wanting to order additional boxes because it might be a lot to share. My two (that are old enough to cook) haven’t had a problem, though (and they don’t necessarily get along all that well, so it can’t be chalked up to that).
And I wonder about the dinner section. If each tabbed section is taken in turn, it seems that dinner would get a little short-changed. But I’ll reserve judgment on that until we’re far enough in to really see how they handle that. (Just because I don’t see the plan doesn’t mean there isn’t a plan!)
So, yeah; I’d call this one a win. 
Now through June 30th, get 25% off the first kit in your subscription with coupon code WELCOME25. (Sibling upgrades excluded.)
Kidstir – Teaching Kids About Nutrition the FUN Way is a post from: Titus 2 Homemaker
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