An exciting food partnership!

At Little Forest Folk we are passionate about giving children healthy nutritious meals and snacks. But more than that, we want to steer our children away from traditional kids food such as sausage and beans or fish fingers and chips.

Little Forest Food challenges our children's tastebuds. We create a delicate balance of dishes that are suitable for adults and families to eat together, whilst also ensuring they are dishes the children adore.

We also want to ensure children aren't disconnected from food. Rather than simply asking children to eat what's put in front of them, we see our role as to introduce children to the importance of healthy eating. We want to introduce a love of food and an understanding of what is healthy whilst also giving children the opportunity to learn about ingredients and even try their hand at cooking themselves.

This was all easy to manage when we first opened and our Cordon Bleu trained founder Leanna did all the cooking and menu creation herself. Now that we are growing rapidly, we've reached the next stage of our food preparation and are absolutely delighted to be taking Becky Beasley on board as our chef. Many of you will already know Becky as our incredibly passionate cookery teacher.

We are very fortunate in Becky to have someone who not only understands our passion for good food, but who is equally as dedicated to ensuring children understand and appreciate where their food comes from.

We are very excited by the introduction of Becky to the Little Forest Folk team as Head Chef and have been busy sampling breadsticks, carrot muffins, courgette cakes and the like all week.....

We will begin on 6th June with the introduction of our new menu including such treats as:

Snacks
Seeded breadsticks, Apple and raisin flapjack, Carrot muffin, Homemade fruit leather, Oatcakes, Courgette muffins and lots more....

Lunches
Margaritas style puff pastry tart, Feta and spinach burek, New potato salad with hardboiled eggs and pickles, Savoury choux buns, Sweetcorn and cheddar cornbread and lots more......

Dinners
Farfalle with herby bolognaise sauce and a green salad, Oven baked chicken tikka with pitta bread and sliced cucumber, Spinach and cheese savoury bread pudding with minted petit pots, Italian bean stew with parmesan rind and herbs, Smoked mackerel potato gratin with baby-leaf spinach and lots more.....

We plan to begin by introducing our new menu on 6th June. Once the children are settled into the new menu we plan to gradually increase the children's involvement in their meal preparation. We will introduce a Little Forest Folk sourdough starter which the children will assist us in making and adding extra ingredients to. The children will begin to assist us in pickling foods and one day we will achieve our dream of having the children grow vegetables before cultivating them and cooking them in their own dinners.

Recipe to try at home

We are very excited for this new collaboration to begin. If all this talk of tasty food has whet your appetite a little, here's a great recipe to try with your little ones at home. If they are veteran LFF children, they will even be able to help peel the apples!

This Flapjacks recipe makes 24 flapjacks for hungry Little Forest Folk

400g Bramley apples, peeled, cored and chopped
200ml cold water
200g cinnamon sticks
20g rolled oats
Up to 60g honey (as you like, for sweetness)
80g raisins
1 tsp baking powder
Sunflower oil for greasing

Cook the apples to a pulp with the water and cinnamon over a moderate heat with a lid on the pan for about 8-10 minutes. Leave to cool.
Preheat the oven to 180C / Gas mark 4.
Mix the oats, honey (if using), raisins and baking powder in a bowl.
Add the apple pulp to the oats, removing the cinnamon sticks, and mix well.
Spoon into a greased 20 x 28cm baking tin, 5cm deep, and smooth out even and flat. Try not to have too many raisins poking out from the surface of the flapjack as these tend to catch in the oven-poke them down with your forefinger.
Cook for 30-35 minutes, until nicely coloured and firm on top
Leave to cool in the tin for 10 minutes before cutting into squares. Cool on a wire rack.

Devour!

As ever, we would love to hear your feedback on changes. We love hearing what our little ones feed back to us about food and menus whilst in our care, but if you have any talk at home about our new menu, please let us know!

Have a great week!

Little Forest Folk

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