Easy Recipe: Melting Meatball Pizza Puffs

If there’s one thing the boys in my house will always eat with gusto, it’s meatballs. I always like to have a packet in the freezer for an emergency dinner of spaghetti and meatballs, but I use them in other things too. They favour a meaty meatball, whereas I always have a packet of Quorn meatballs so I can join in the meatball fun. This week I had a gaggle of the smallish boy’s friends over, so I whipped up a batch of my Melting Meatball Pizza Puffs to feed the crowd.

These Melting Meatball Pizza Puffs took me ten minutes to throw together and twenty minutes to cook. They’re the perfect satisfying meaty snack for on the go kids and adults. They’re so easy to throw together and really hit the spot, especially if the spot likes meaty, pizza flavoured, melted cheese covered snacks!

Melting Meatball Pizza Puffs

Ingredients (makes 12):
1 sheet of ready-made puff pastry
1/2 jar of pizza topping
12 meatballs
Grated cheese, I used cheddar

Method:
Pre-heat your oven to 220° and grease a muffin tin. Take your ready rolled sheet of puff pastry and cut out 12 rounds, put them in the greased muffin tray.

Easy Recipe: Melting Meatball Pizza Puffs — Ready to go into the oven.

In each round, dollop half a teaspoon of pizza topping. You can buy a jar or make your own, whichever you prefer. Place one meatball (if using frozen, make sure it’s defrosted) on top of the pizza topping; fill all 12 rounds and put in the oven. Bake for 15 minutes.

Remove from the oven and top each meatball with some grated cheese; return to the oven for five more minutes until the cheese has melted. Remove your cooked meatball melts from the oven and leave to cool for a few minutes. Serve with ketchup or whatever else you fancy.

They’re such a good little snack and a great way to turn your humble meatball into something a bit different.

If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy this recipe for tinned meatball pizza, yes it does sounds a bit strange, but it’s worth a try!

Easy Recipe: Melting Meatball Pizza Puffs

Review: Fairfields Farm Heat & Eat Crisps

I have a monthly get together and craft night with some friends, we each take turns to host it. Craft night means three things, prosecco, crafts and crisps. This week it was my turn to host. I chilled a couple of bottles of fizz, dug out some craft stuff and revealed, with something of a flourish, a large bag of Fairfields Farm Heat & Eat Crisps.

“They’re microwavable!” I announced. “They’re hot crisps!” I said with a bit of a fanfare. My friends were understandably quite curious and keen to try this new style of snack.

Review: Fairfields Farm Heat & Eat Crisps

I opened the bag, took out the dip and microwaved the crisps for 30 seconds. We tried the Fairfields Farm Cheese and Chive flavour Heat & Eat crisps. Inside the bag is a small tub of delicious caramelised onion dip.

The Fairfields Farm Heat & Eat Crisps are good crunchy, thick cut crisps, the kind I would buy anyway as they’re great for dipping. I like that they come with a little pot of dip included. The caramelised onion was so good, I’d quite like them to sell jars of the stuff.

Review: Fairfields Farm Heat & Eat Crisps

There are two flavours – Sea Salted with Tomato Salsa Dip and Cheese & Chive with Caramelised Onion Dip. Each bag contains 125g of hand-cooked crisps and a 50g dip. When the crisps are hot, they are what I imagine freshly cooked crisps taste like, fresh and crunchy. You do have to eat them fairly quickly because they do cool down; but they’re still excellent when they’ve cooled and the hot crisps are a real talking point. The girls were impressed and they all said they would buy them again.

Fairfields Farm which is in East Anglia have been making crisps from their potatoes since 2006. The Heat & Eat Crisps were launched just a few months ago and are hand cooked on the farm using renewable energy.

These new Fairfields Farm Heat & Eat Crisps cost around £1.85 a bag, which I think is a very good price for good quality crunchy crisps which come with a dip.

Review: Fairfields Farm Heat & Eat Crisps

Fairfields Farm Heat & Eat Crisps are currently available in a wide selection of Tesco Stores across the UK to find your nearest stockist visit http://fairfieldsfarmcrisps.co.uk/

Note: we were sent these crisps for review purposes. All images and opinions are our own.

Review: Real Handful Snacks

Being the mother of a boy I sometimes struggle to fill his hollow legs. He’s hungry, always hungry, but he runs around like a dervish so he burns it off in double quick time. I’ve learnt to always keep a snack on my person for when he gets hungry. He likes dried fruit, so when I was asked to try Real Handful snacks I knew we would enjoy putting them to the test.

Review: Real Handful Snacks

Real Handful are little 40g packets of dried fruit with nuts and little bits of chocolate mixed in. They feel like a bit of a naughty treat, but are quite healthy and are just the right size to keep a small boy going until teatime. Each of the 40g packets of Real Handful contains around 160-200 calories per packet and are full of good things such as fibre, protein and good fats, as well as being one of your five (or is it ten) a day!

Review: Real Handful Snacks

There are six kinds Real Handful snacks available –

Blood Orange & Dark Chocolate – blood orange flavoured sultanas, orange flavoured cranberries, dark chocolate and peanuts.
G0-Go-Goji Berries – a blend of nuts, raisins and seeds with goji berries and dark chocolate.
Blueberry Blitz – blueberries, blueberry flavoured raisins, jumbo flame raisins and whole cashews.
Strawberries & Cream – strawberry flavoured raisins, strawberries, cranberries, white chocolate and cashews.
Mixed Berry Crush – blueberry flavoured yoghurt covered raisins, strawberry, cranberries and whole almonds.
Mochacchino – a rich blend of coffee sultanas, cranberries, whole cashew nuts, dark chocolate coffee beans and coffee flavour chocolate drops.

We couldn’t get enough of these Real handful snacks, admittedly my son kindly donated the nuts to me and his dad, but the dried fruit and chocolate were a real hit. I loved the Mochacchino flavour, with its chocolate covered coffee beans. I really enjoyed the mix of fruit and nuts with a smattering of chocolate, these would be great with a mid-afternoon brew to keep me going until teatime, they really are quite filling.

Review: Real Handful Snacks

These are the perfect size to slip into your bag if you’re going out and about, or to keep in your desk drawer for when hunger strikes and are great if you’re wanting to snack a little healthier.

You can buy Real Handful from Holland & Barrett, Ocado, Booths and Boots. Prices start from £1.29. Visit their website for more information.

Review: Real Handful Snacks

I was sent these Real Handful snacks for review purposes. All images and opinions are our own.

Review: ChewyMoon subscription snack box for children

We were sent a ChewyMoon snack box for review purposes. All images and opinions are our own.

After school the small boy likes to come home to a drink and a little snack. He’s very fond of both fresh and dried fruit, so he normally gets something like that to munch on. An afternoon snack for him is something of a sanity saver for me, if he goes without he’s often so hungry by 5pm he’s howling for his tea. A handful of dried fruit is just enough to tide him over till teatime. This week his afternoon snacks have been courtesy of ChewyMoon, and very nice they are too!

ChewyMoon subscription snack box for children

ChewyMoon is the UK’s first nutritionally-balanced subscription snack box for children between the ages of 4 and 10. Their snacks are made from natural ingredients, with no refined sugar or nasties. There are five snacks in a box, together with a ‘fun pack’ comprising comics, fact cards and totem toys, so the box just as much fun as it is healthy.

In our ChewyMoon box there were five little boxes of snacks – just the right size for a quick nibble. They’re in really fun, brightly coloured boxes (which we’ve saved, I’m sure they’ll be brilliant for using in a craft project). The snacks are all nutritionally balanced and healthy, full of fruit, nuts, seeds and other goodies. He loved eating them and enjoyed trying the different snack boxes.

ChewyMoon subscription snack box for children

The ChewyMoon box comes with some fun things too. Ours contained a card to help us identify different kinds of clouds – we’ve stuck that to the fridge for reference purposes. There was also a space monkey “totem” which you popped out of the card and made into a little stand alone figure and a little comic strip to read.

It’s colourful, fun, a little bit educational, healthy and the box arrives every week through your letterbox, addressed to your child. That alone is beyond exciting for my six year old!

ChewyMoon subscription snack box for children

The ChewyMoon website is fab, it’s got lots of nutritional advice and information for parents. You can also rate each snack, so you can get more of what you like and less of what you don’t.

Your ChewyMoon subscription box is delivered weekly and costs £4.95 per week, you can order a free trial box (just pay postage) to see if you like it. We did like it a lot. I felt that although my son generally enjoys healthy snacks, this was a great way to introduce him to some other kinds of snacks he might enjoy. There were a couple of things in our selection of snacks which challenged him, but with a little encouragement he tried them, enjoyed them and would have them again.

As a parent I try to encourage healthy eating and part of that is discovering new things to eat; exploring flavours and textures and encouraging him to be open to new experiences with food. I think ChewyMoon is a really fun box, but also a way to develop an interest in new things, which is never a bad thing.

For more information about ChewyMoon, visit their website.

Review: Real Handful Snacks

Being the mother of a boy I sometimes struggle to fill his hollow legs. He’s hungry, always hungry, but he runs around like a dervish so he burns it off in double quick time. I’ve learnt to always keep a snack upon my person for when he gets hungry, he likes dried fruit, so when I was asked to try Real Handful I knew my son would enjoy putting them to the test.

Real Handful are little 40g packets of dried fruit with nuts and little bits of chocolate mixed in. They feel like a bit of a naughty treat, but are quite healthy and are just the right size to keep a small boy going until teatime. Each of the 40g packets of Real Handful contains around 160-170 calories per packet and are full of good things such as fibre and good fats, as well as being one of your five (or is it seven) a day!

Real Handful

There are six kinds Real Handful available –

Blood Orange & Dark Chocolate – blood orange flavoured sultanas, orange flavoured cranberries, dark chocolate and peanuts.
G0-Go-Goji Berries – a blend of nuts, raisins and seeds with goji berries and dark chocolate.
Blueberry Blitz – blueberries, blueberry flavoured raisins, jumbo flame raisins and whole cashews.
Strawberries & Cream – strawberry flavoured raisins, strawberries, cranberries, white chocolate and cashews.
Mixed Berry Crush – blueberry flavoured yoghurt covered raisins, strawberry, cranberries and whole almonds.
Mochacchino – a rich blend of coffee sultanas, cranberries, whole cashew nuts, dark chocolate coffee beans and coffee flavour chocolate drops.

Real Handful

The small boy couldn’t get enough of these Real handful snacks, admittedly he kindly donated the nuts to me and his dad, but the dried fruit and chocolate were a real hit. I only managed to try the Mochacchino flavour (the small boy shaped plague of locusts had snaffled the rest) but I really enjoyed the mix of fruit and nuts with a smattering of chocolate, these would be great with a mid-afternoon brew to keep me going until teatime.

These are the perfect size to slip into your bag if you’re going out and about, or to keep in your desk drawer for when hunger strikes and are great if you’re wanting to snack a little healthier.

You can buy Real Handful from Holland & Barrett, Ocado and Harris & Hoole, prices start from £1.29. Visit their website for more information.

I was sent these Real Handful snacks for review purposes. All images and opinions are our own.

Review: The Snack Organisation Rice Crackers

Way back in October in my monthly Degustabox I discovered a packet of sweet chilli rice crackers from The Snack Organisation. I’d had rice crackers before and they were a bit meh, nice enough, but you needed a good dollop of dip or a wedge of cheese to make a decent snack out of them. I wasn’t expecting much, but I was mightily impressed by these little healthy disks of flavour. So much so that I now buy them regularly.

The Snack Organisation got in touch with me before Christmas and arranged to send me some healthy snacks for New Year. I’d only tried the sweet chilli flavour so I was keen to try the teriyaki and the lightly salted to see how they compared.

Rice Crackers

Each cracker is around 25 calories each, they’re small, but big enough to pile on some hummus or cream cheese. They cost around £1 per pack and there are stacks of rice crackers in each pack. I sampled each cracker “naked” ie without a topping, and then I spread a laughing cow cheese cube on (14 calories each), making each cracker approx 40 calories in total.

The sweet chilli rice crackers were still as dangerously moreish as they were the first time I tried them, just the right amount of sweet chilli heat, bags of flavour and crunchy. With the soft cheese on top these turned into what felt like a treat, but fairly low calorie. I’m having to stop myself from eating the whole packet!

Next up were the lightly salted rice crackers. I wasn’t expecting them to be too exciting, but they worked incredibly well on their own, really snacky, I could happy go through a bowl of these whilst watching TV of an evening. If you’re prone to snacking on a bag of crisps or two, then these are a good alternative, hitting all the right crunchy, savoury notes but being better for you and more filling than standard crisps.

soy sauce, sake, ginger

I was surprisingly less keen on the teriyaki flavour, but hubs liked them the best, so that’s a happy ending. Teriyaki has soy sauce, sake and ginger flavours, so maybe they just didn’t go so well with my cheese cubes. I didn’t dislike them, they just didn’t hit the spot for me as much as they did for hubs. But the sweet chilli flavour will be my downfall!

These rice crackers are a great little snack, pretty healthy, definitely more filling than crisps and really flavoursome, your taste buds will never guess that you’re giving your body a healthy treat!

Note: We were sent these rice crackers from The Snack Organisation to try for review purposes. All images and opinions are our own.