How to taste the world without leaving your house
Still stranded at home, we made a quick escape to India this week. And we did it without ever leaving our kitchen.
Missing travel, and the food adventures that come with it, we recently signed up for eat2explore, a monthly subscription kit. It contains recipes and spices from different countries and lots of other fun stuff.
In the kit
Each kit comes with three recipes; and spices, seasonings and/or grains that accompany those recipes. This provides authentic flavors for the meal. You’ll buy the fresh ingredients needed to complete the recipes. There’s also a cooking tool, in this particular box, it was an electronic timer. The kit contains information about the location. In the India box we learned about architecture and art as well as the Diwali festival. Last, but not least, there’s a collectible enamel country pin.
In the kitchen
The goal of eat2explore is to get families cooking together. Most recipes require some adult assistance. The recipe cards indicate the level of difficulty. However, the India recipes were easy enough for my 13-year-old daughter to follow. She made the first meal on her own – Kofta meatball curry with naan bread and sautĂ©ed cabbage. We don’t eat a lot of cabbage. This dish reminded us how good cabbage can be when prepared right. But the Kofta meatballs were the star of this meal, drenched in a tasty (not too spicy) curry sauce.
On the second night, my 8-year-old son donned his apron and got to work. He assisted me with the cilantro coconut chicken curry with naan and roasted cauliflower. He’s a champ when it comes to chopping. This meal was simple to prepare, just what we needed on a weeknight.
By night three, the kids were done helping and I was on my own in the kitchen. I whipped up vegetable korma with basmati rice. This meal was vegetarian and it was tasty. The other two recipes in the India kit had a vegetarian option.
I appreciated that the meals were all easy to prepare and included plenty of vegetables. Most importantly, the kids liked (and ate!) the food.
Each dish is a standalone meal. We learned this the hard way on our first kit when we attempted to make all three eat2explore South Korea meals on the same night. You’ll want to make the meals over three nights. We made them consecutively, but you don’t have to.
To maximize your experience, be sure to create an account on the eat2explore website for supplemental activities and information about the country. For instance, the daily lesson plans provide a week’s worth of activities about the country.
Subscribe & save
If you’d like to try out eat2explore, KidTripster fans receive a 20% discount using the code KIDTRIP20.
Gluten-free and vegetarian boxes are available to those with food preferences or allergies.
Is a subscription kit right for your kids? We reviewed several of them to find out.
The author received a complimentary kit for the purpose of this review. All opinions are her own.
