Piggy Pasta and More Food with Attitude product reviews

The cover of the ' Piggy Pasta and More Food with Attitude ' book is awesome - to me it conjured ideas of interesting food, ideas for party's, and how to make meals a bit more fun ( which for me is great, as I tend to be a little boring!! ) We have three children - 5.5, 3 and 16 months and I was very impressed to see a wide range of foods and ideas to cater for all these age ranges, plus adults, as well... after all - Piggy Pasta DOES sound good, right!

Miss Five and a half and Miss Three grabbed this book out of the box as soon as it arrived and wanted to make EVERYTHING. They both ooo-d and ahh-d over all the pictures, and excitedly asking " how is this one made " and " do we have the ingredients? ". I was really pleased ( and relieved ) to see that most of the ingredients were things that people have in their cupboards and fridges, or can get with little fuss from a dairy or supermarket - always a good thing!

We ( well me! ) decided on two things to try over the next few days - Monkey Puzzle Pull-Aparts (kind of a doughnutty / muffin type thing) and the Quesadilla Mini Stack - plus I chose the UFO cookies to make as a surprise for the kids. All three of the recipes have clear, concise instructions, easy to read ingredient lists, and nice pictures. This makes for a happy Mum and kids, who have something to look forward to.

For the Mini Stack we used the Hot Diggity Dogs tortillas recipe, and it turned out well, but did make more than expected, so we cooked a few extra tortillas up to have the next day ( win win really, saves me time!! ). The kids all LOVED these - Master 16 months as he could demolish and pull the stack down, and the girls, well , for pretty much the same reason!

The following day we attempted the Monkey Puzzle Pull-Aparts. This recipe was a little more time consuming, as you have to let the dough rest in between instructions, however, I had made allowances for this, and made sure we had activities to keep us occupied. These were also more fiddly and in hindsight, I would do the last few steps by myself, to minimise the mess and clean up - though the kids had a BALL with melted butter!! Delicious - that is the best word for these - buttery, cinnamony little balls of delight - mmmmm.... Worth the mess, TOTALLY!

Onto the UFO cookies - and another simple, well set out recipe to follow. I knew these would be a hit, with chocolate and M and M's, and they were! I baked the cookie bases and then the girls and I decorated and did the rest. We did a slight variation and used white chocolate as well for some - which aesthetically I liked better!!

All in all this book is pretty neat - giving food interesting names and making it WAY more appealing! I was as excited to make it as the kids were to eat it I think!! I do love that there are everyday ideas as well as special occasion and snack foods as well - definitely will be a well used book in this household!!

The front cover of 'Piggy Pasta and More Food with Attitude' book begged me to look further into it. I just wondered what it would be like to eat pick pasta and how they did it. When I looked through the book I was glad to see that it was done using beetroot rather than colouring.

This book adds a lot of fun to creating meals and treats. Mr Four was very excited about what we could create when we looked through the book together. The images are very enticing and we enjoyed simply looking at the photos together. When I looked at the ingredients required for the recipes I saw that the majority of the ingredients were things that most people would have in their pantry at home. There were some items such as cream, chocolates, sweets etc that people would most likely need to purchase in order to make the food. I think it is good that the ingredients were kept to simple options in general.

Mr Four and I chose two recipes to try to begin with. We decided that it would be good to have one thing for dinner and one thing for dessert. We don't usually make desserts in our house, so this was a treat. The usual options for our children are fruit or yogurt. The items we chose were 'Hot Diggity Dogs and Crazy Slaw' and 'Banoffee Boats'.

We started by making the dough for the tortillas (for the Hot Diggity Dogs). Mr Four did most of the measuring and mixing and had great fun. I found that they rolled out extremely well, in fact better than any other dough I have ever made. I think that is because they contained quite a bit of oil. We had a couple of friends coming for dinner and the ball of dough didn't look quite big enough for our family plus the extras so I made up a second batch. The recipe stated that they needed to be cooked on a pan. I decided that I would use our toasted sandwich maker. It worked ok but I had to be very careful not to cooked them too long as they became too hard and not easy to wrap. They were still tasty though. I used the excitement form the cook book to enough the children to choose as many different colour salad items as possible to add to their tortilla (I stayed away from the slaw in the recipe as I knew that the kids were more likely to eat a salad if they made it themselves straight into their tortilla).

It seemed we only needed a little over the single batch and ended up with extra dough. I put the extra uncooked dough in glad wrap and kept it in the fridge. I used it to make wraps for lunch for the next two days. That worked really well. When I used the dough for the lunches, I thought I would experiment with using the toasted sandwich maker while open rather than closed. This helped the tortilla to stay softer rather than the harder version we had had for dinner. We will be making the tortilla recipe again as we all enjoyed it.

The Banoffee Boats turned out more like flat biscuits than boats. I am not sure what happened as I made the 'canoe shapes' required for the boats in the recipe and then flattened out almost completely. We just made do and had more of an iced biscuit version of the dessert than a boat! I really liked the taste of the biscuits as they weren't too sweet. This was quite a simple dessert to make and delicious, even if they didn't turn out according to the picture!

When you give food an exciting name and add a bit of fun to it, kids get excited and are more likely to eat food that they wouldn't usually eat. There are some great party ideas in this book, as well as some healthier recipes which could be used in everyday life to encourage children to eat and also provide a bit of fun.