Spatulatta won a James Beard Award for Best Webcast, which is a striking credit to find on a children's cooking site. The project was created and hosted by two sisters, Isabella and Olivia Gerasole, known as Belle and Liv, and it is aimed squarely at children and families cooking together. That award, along with a feature on the PBS program Biz Kids, hands Spatulatta a pedigree that almost no family recipe site can match, and it colours everything else about the place.
The heart of the site is its recipe collection, sorted two ways at once. Dishes are grouped by meal, running from breakfast through lunch, dinner and desserts, and again by ingredient focus, with vegetarian, meat, fruit and salad categories for anyone steering by what happens to be in the fridge. Special sections cover holidays, picnics and fun food activities, that last one pointed straight at holding a child's attention past the first bite. It reads like a site organised by people who know how kids actually approach a kitchen.
Recipes and the Cook by the Book series
Two things set Spatulatta apart from a generic recipe blog. It was built by and for children, with the young cooks themselves front and center, and it grew into a small franchise spanning a book, a video channel and a teaching series. The website is only the hub; the project reaches well past it.
The recipe collection
The recipes lean seasonal and approachable. Recent posts point to autumn dishes such as Fall Cupcakes and Pumpkin Pot Pies, which suggests the site is at least updated from time to time rather than left frozen. The instructions are written for young hands, so the tone stays plain and the steps stay short, and the vegetarian and fruit categories give a parent a way to steer a picky eater toward something green without turning dinner into a standoff.
Nothing here is fussy or chef-driven; the whole collection is built around dishes a child can help make and then feel proud of.
The cookbook and the videos
The Spatulatta Cookbook, subtitled "Recipes for Kids, by Kids," is the flagship spin-off, and it is backed by a companion educational series called Cook by the Book. Above that sits a YouTube channel that a third-party review counts at more than 350 videos, a genuine library for a child who learns a recipe better by watching it done than by reading it off a page.
Between the book, the teaching series and that stack of videos, Spatulatta is more than a page of printable recipes. It is a small teaching brand, and the fact that kids are the ones demonstrating is the hook that separates it from the adult-fronted cooking channels a parent would otherwise reach for.
Put the pieces side by side and the appeal for a household is clear. A parent can pull up a written recipe, hand a tablet to the child to watch the matching video, and work through it together, with the cookbook on the shelf for the ones that become favourites.
The two-axis sorting helps here too: a family that wants a meatless Monday and a family that just bought a glut of apples both find their way in without scrolling past dozens of unrelated dishes. For the narrow job of getting a young child cooking, Spatulatta assembles the right tools in one place.
Outside verdicts on the site itself are sparse, and it is worth being plain about that. Common Sense Media hosts a formal review with separate parent and kid sections, but the turnout is tiny: zero parent reviews and a single kid review, which recommends the site for ages ten and up. No site-wide star rating from Trustpilot, Google, Yelp or the BBB surfaced for Spatulatta anywhere, so there is no crowd score to lean on, only that lone young reviewer and the professional writeups behind the awards.
The book has a firmer track record than the website does. On Goodreads the Spatulatta Cookbook holds a 4.28 average across 18 ratings and 7 reviews on the author page for Isabella Gerasole, and further reviews appear on Walmart, YA Books Central and a children's book review site, though those are qualitative and show no star counts. It is a small sample, but a warm one, and it says the printed recipes landed well with the families who actually cooked from them.
Contact runs through a contact page that a visitor has to click into. No phone number, address or email sits out on the homepage, and the most visible ways to keep up are the Facebook page and the YouTube channel. For a family recipe site that arrangement is ordinary, and the Facebook and YouTube links carry most of the load a contact form would, since a comment or a direct message reaches the people running it either way.
The honest read on Spatulatta is mixed, and it turns on a single unknown. The credentials stand on their own, a James Beard Award, a PBS feature, a well-liked cookbook and a deep video archive, and the idea of children teaching children to cook still holds up.
The concern is currency. One third-party review hints that the site is no longer as active as it once was, a note cut short in the record and not confirmed here, and the near-total absence of recent user reviews does nothing to settle the question. The videos and the seasonal recipes deliver on their own, which covers most of what a family cooking with a young child actually needs.
Whether Spatulatta still functions as a living, regularly updated community is the open question, and how fresh the latest posts actually are is worth checking before treating the site as anything more than that archive.
