Little Passports recently came out with a new subscription line that I think is absolutely adorable! Little Passports made Kitchen Adventures in conjunction with America’s Test Kitchen Kids and it’s a sweet little kit.
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The Kitchen Adventures kit includes
A quality kitchen tool: it actually kind of drives me nuts when kits include kitchen tools. I mean, most of us already have a pair of tongs, and they’re cheaper to acquire from a grocery store. Sure, it might be nice for my kids to build their own tool collection, but let’s face it: by the time my kids move out, these tools will be long since destroyed.
A fun activity: in this case, building a marble maze styled after a traditional pasta bowl. These are the things that my kids get really, really excited about, but they usually wind up collecting dust on a shelf. Or getting destroyed pretty quickly. Let’s put it this way: still not the reason I’m excited about this kit.
Four recipes: THIS is why I love this kit! I love getting recipes to make dishes from other countries, and my kids LOVE our country feasts!! We believe learning happens best through the stomach. Our kit about Rome came with two pastas, a bread, and a desert, with difficulties from beginner to advanced. (I also love that the difficulty level is included. It makes it so much easier to dive in when you know you’re tackling an easier recipe.)
A shopping list: okay, this is a really awesome touch. Having everything already listed out for me makes the whole thing much more likely to be done. This is definitely a super awesome bonus.
A sweet letter from Sam and Sophia: this line continues Little Passport‘s theme of adventures with Sam and Sophia, but don’t worry. If you haven’t met them yet, you’re introduced just fine and you won’t be in the dark.
Lots of extra bits of information
I love that the Kitchen Adventures kit doesn’t have any worksheets. My kids are really excited about each part of this kit.
Making the marble maze
My kids (ages 7 and 9 at the time), were able to put together the kit pretty easily on their own. I pointed out a few things, gave a few pointers, and did one small part, but my biggest role was making sure big brother didn’t take over and leave his sister nothing to do. I think most younger kids would require more help, but I was impressed with how much my kids were able to do on their own.
Making the recipes
We started with the Pizza Bianca recipe, but it requires two hours to rise. We set it aside while we made and ate the Cacio e Pepe.
Cacio e Pepe (pasta)
The cacio e pepe (cheese and pepper) was supposed to be of “intermediate” difficulty. Okay, it wasn’t hard, but it didn’t turn out very well. First of all, we couldn’t find pecorino romano cheese; probably if we were closer to a larger city, that would have been easier. We substituted it with parmesan reggiano. However, our cheese was fresh and we needed to grate it. Even on the “fine” side of our cheese grater, that’s still not very fine.
Modifications we want to try include using that prepackaged, pre-grated parmesan cheese, whisking the sauce in the stand mixer, and using the immersion blender. Our sauce did not turn out well. It was very clumpy (we think our water was actually too hot). However, it was very tasty. My husband found this very informative video about why this recipe is actually not so easy to make, and how to make it easier.
Update: my husband made cacio e pepe again tonight, this time following the recipe in the above video. It turned out much better, and he said it was not only a lot easier, but much more satisfying to make. He did use the pre-grated parmesan cheese, too.
Pizza Bianca
And back to the Pizza Bianca recipe: we only use whole wheat flour, so that’s what we used here, and it still turned out pretty good. We also couldn’t find kosher salt, so just used regular table salt. Looking into it further, this is basically a focaccia recipe, but it was still really tasty. With the more stable cheese sauce made in the above video, it would have been amazing!
Chocolate Semifreddo
This chocolate mousse is delicious. Even though the custard broke on us and the eggs started to cook at the bottom, it still turned out fantastic. It’s also supposed to be chilled in individual ramekins, which of course, we don’t have. So we chilled it in the mixing bowl we made it in, then served it into our individual bowls, and it survived just fine. I do think it’d be better with dark chocolate chips, but it was pretty good as-is.
Bucatini All’Amatriciana
This pasta dish was enjoyed by my daughter, but my husband and I didn’t care for it. It wasn’t bad, just a bit much for us. It was basically pasta with red sauce with bacon in it. (We got pancetta, but we’d only gotten 2 ounces and the recipe called for 6, so we added in some bacon.) If you can cook bacon and make a sauce, then this will be an easy recipe for you. For my husband, our resident chef, it was no big deal. It was a little spicy, but not bad.
