Alright, so I finally got my hands on this Melissa & Doug Food Fun Combine & Dine Dinners set. Been meaning to grab something like this for a while, you know, to see what the fuss is about with these wooden food toys. The box itself looked promising, colourful and all that jazz. So, first things first, I unboxed the whole thing. Laid all the pieces out on the living room floor. It’s quite a collection of little wooden food items, I gotta say.
You get these four wooden dinner trays, kinda like old-school TV dinner trays but, you know, nicer and wooden. Then there’s a whole bunch of food: chicken, fish, steak, spaghetti, peas, corn, carrots, broccoli, even a little roll and some dessert items like cookies and a slice of cake. Pretty varied stuff, actually.
Putting the ‘Combine & Dine’ to the Test
So, the idea, as the name suggests, is to combine these different food items on the trays to make little pretend dinners. We started just messing around, picking up pieces. The kiddo, of course, went straight for the brightly coloured items first. The slice of cake was an immediate hit, no surprise there.
I started by trying to make a somewhat “sensible” meal on one tray – a piece of steak, some broccoli, and a few peas. Then, I handed a tray over to my little one and just let them go at it. It was interesting to see what combinations they came up with. Spaghetti with a side of fish and a cookie for good measure? Sure, why not! That’s the fun of it, I suppose.
We spent a good chunk of time just swapping items, loading up the trays, and then “serving” the dinners. I’d ask, “What did you make for me?” and get a very enthusiastic, if slightly jumbled, description of the culinary masterpiece. We even pretended to “eat” the food, complete with sound effects. The wooden pieces are chunky and easy for small hands to grab and move around, which is a big plus.
We tried to use all the pieces, making different combinations.
- Sometimes we’d aim for balanced meals.
- Other times, it was just a free-for-all of favorite items piled high.
- We even pretended one tray was for breakfast, one for lunch, you get the idea.
The pieces themselves feel quite sturdy, which is what you’d expect from Melissa & Doug. They’ve already been dropped a couple of times, and so far, so good – no chips or broken bits. They’re painted nicely too, quite appealing. We sorted them by food group for a bit, then mixed them all up again. It’s a straightforward toy, really. No batteries, no complicated instructions. Just good old-fashioned pretend play.
By the end of it, we had “cooked” and “served” a whole bunch of meals. It was a decent way to spend an afternoon, getting the imagination going. Definitely saw some creative dinner combinations I wouldn’t have thought of myself! It’s one of those toys that just sits there and invites you to play, which is pretty cool.
