With the Cookwise course, the aim is to use basic fresh ingredients, maybe using some of the excellent local food producers in your area, (do your bit towards reducing food miles and support local people), to make healthy, enjoyable family meals.

While cooking, and enjoying themselves, your children will also be practising reading, listening, maths - measuring volume and weight, estimating, science - permanent and reversible reactions, aesthetics, and much more....., and it will be such fun!

Cooking should be fun and so should meal times. A healthy diet is most likely to be achieved by eating a wide variety of different foods. Having cooked the food themselves, children are far more likely to try new things (I might need your support and encouragement here - you will need to be prepared to try new things too!). The Cookwise present packs and subscription courses will give them the confidence to do it. I hope what we offer will encourage and enable your children to cook complete meals at home - real food as my children describe it - rather than just cakes and biscuits. Admittedly most of us like those things too, but cooking a meal to share with the rest of the family, with grandparents or with friends is extra special.

We are based near the beautiful city of Wells in Somerset , and also offer workshop days and parties from our home base and larger premises in Wells. If you live within travelling distance of us, have a look at what is on offer. It would be great to hear from you.

Sarah Laing

IN THE NEWS - MAY 2007

Cookwise was chosen to take part in a ‘tried and tested’ comparison of children’s cookery courses by mums and working, an online magazine.  We were delighted that the Cookwise course was chosen as the overall winner by the 3 families who tried it. 

Overall Winner Cookwise           

Our testers and their children loved the Cookwise pack - value for money with great recipes - the personalised apron was a special touch.

Here is what they thought…………………….

Children's Home Cookery Courses

Inge Taylor & Olivia Andrea Jones & Ethan, Finlay and Xavier Clare Rogers & Charlie and Grace 

£30.00 - Buy online - www.cookwise.co.uk

The Cookwise pack was good value for the money - Olivia loved the fact that the apron had her name on it. Nice range of smaller kitchen utensils suitable for children to use. I thought that there was a nice range of recipes included and Olivia thought that they all looked "yummy". The recipes used very straight forward ingredients that I either had in at home or could buy easily at my local shops. Olivia could manage to cook the recipes as long as I was helping - it was good for her to have pictures at each stage showing what her recipe should be looking like. Our favourite pack!

I was impressed when I received this kit. It was really nicely presented in a red gift bag and contained a lot.

The recipes were all laminated and came in a red folder along with general safety instructions. You could also access their website and podcast tutorials on each recipe to help further, which is great if you are really interested in learning more. For each recipe there was also an action plan and a shopping list. There were plenty of recipes and what I thought was very good is that they had loads of alternatives for each recipe - suggestions for making it less spicy, shortcuts and ingredients for vegetarian, gluten free or dairy free diets.

Ethan quite likes spicy food so we tried the tandoori chicken and pilau rice. The ingredients were readily available, the instructions easy to follow and there were plenty of pictures to assist along the way. Ethan could manage himself with a little bit of supervision and really enjoyed the finished meal.

I liked the look of this kit and think that with everything you get in the kit and the quality of it, it represents really good value for money.

We were very impressed with this kit - it arrived in a lovely glossy red bag. Charlie got a lovely apron with his name on it – and straight away after seeing it he wanted to cook. It made him feel special. The recipes all looked very tempting - 5 different meals were given so we had lots of choice. Charlie chose Somerset Pork but chose a different dessert from another meal - Chocolate Pear Pudding. There were step by step photographs which were helpful for Charlie. We had most of the ingredients at home - there were some that were more select but having the shopping lists made it all so easy. The recipes were perfect for Charlie's age, the cookworm sections showed you where your child could do it on there own or if the cookworm wasn't there then you knew you would have to help. There was plenty of opportunity for Charlie to do almost all the cooking himself. There were obvious times when I was needed – with the oven etc.

The Somerset Pork was delicious; it was so tasty I would consider doing it for a dinner party! The Pear pudding was ok; it didn't come out exactly the same as the picture, but what it lacked in looks it made up for in taste. Charlie loved it - he felt in control and even took everyone's plate to them – he had fun and I think he was shocked by how good it all turned out.