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Veggie Bottoms Kitchen App Review

App Info

Price: $1.99

Overview

Chef Monty’s kitchen is open for business! Kids can enter Chef Monty’s kitchen and create their own new smoothie recipes using a variety of ingredients. A brussel sprouts, peanut, lemon, kiwi smoothie? A pear, blueberry, kiwi, asparagus smoothie? Anything is possible in the kitchen. Kids can mix and match fruits and veggies to try to unlock Chef Monty’s recipes. When they’re done making smoothies, they can also view a host of real recipes to try out in the kitchen (with a grown-up’s help, of course).

Features include:

Create your own smoothies
Learn fruit and vegetable facts
Unlock smoothie recipes
Discover nut-free, egg-free, dairy-free, and vegan recipes

Quality

Veggie Bottoms Kitchen is organized into two different sections: Test Kitchen and Chef’s Kitchen. Arrow icons help kids easily navigate from one area to the next. On each screen, kids will also see a question mark. Tapping on that question mark will reveal detailed instructions for each page. As kids play, they’ll encounter quality animations and fun sound effects. There are a couple awkward components. For example, when kids add a fruit to their smoothie, the boy in the app shares a fact about the fruit, but he reads the fact in some sort of gibberish. Kids must read the text bubble to know what he said. The app can also feel a bit buys at times. There is a lot of small text on the screen and, on the smoothie screen, kids are shown an additional button to explore recipes featuring one of the ingredients in the smoothie. Overall, the app is well organized and features quality animations, but a few components, such as the text size and extra buttons, could be improved.

Education

This app is designed to teach kids about cooking and provide a subtle message about healthy eating. Kids can make their own combinations of smoothies by dragging four different ingredients into the boxes. As they drag the ingredients, they also learn facts about each fruit and vegetable. For example, kiwi grow on vines and chard contains Vitamin K. Unfortunately these facts are read aloud in some gibberish language. Although the facts also appear in English in a text bubble, it would benefit kids to be able to hear the facts aloud.

In addition to teaching kids about fruits and vegetables, the app also provides kids with tons of recipes that they can make in their own kitchen. When kids finish making their smoothie, they are asked if they want to see a list of recipes featuring one of the ingredients in that smoothie. For example, they may see recipes that feature brussel sprouts or recipes that feature lemons. Kids can also access recipes in the Chef’s Kitchen. There they can organize the recipes by dietary restriction. Kids can discover dairy-free, nut-free, egg-free, and vegan recipes. This makes the app a great resource for parents of kids who have severe food allergies or who choose to live a vegan lifestyle.

Entertainment

Kids will have fun putting together smoothies and trying to guess Chef Monty’s recipes. Chef Monty’s reactions to their concoctions will amuse kids and entice them to create even zanier combinations. Kids who enjoy cooking with also find it fun to discover new recipes in the app and try making them in their own kitchen.

Value

The real value in this app comes from the collection of recipes it contains. Parents who want their kids to eat healthier or who have kids with food allergies may find that the app helps get their kids more excited about healthy eating and cooking.

Child Friendliness

Parents will find a “Rate Me” line on the main screen of the app, but access to the actual rating screen is protected by a parental lock. The app also contains a credits screen and help buttons that simply describe how kids can interact with each page. All of the content in the app is child friendly. However, the recipes the app contains are designed for kids to make with parental supervision.