Foodie Penpals!

It's been such a long while since I last blogged! Rather than bore you all with stories about why this is, I'm just going to ease myself back in gently to the blogosphere with a short and sweet post on Foodie Penpals.

When I was little, probably about 8 or 9 years old, I was obsessed with having Penpals. Way before the days of the internet, I joined a Penpal scheme where you filled in a little pamphlet with all of your details and you simply had to put a tick next to all of the countries where you would like to have a Penpal. It was super simple and cost something like 15 pence per Penpal - you could imagine how wild I went with this – and after a couple of weeks you would receive a list of names and addresses that matched your profile and voila, you had Penpals! The matches didn’t always work, but for quite a few years I wrote to people all over the globe, and each morning I would run down to the postman in my pyjamas to see if he had any mail for me. I know this makes me sound like a real geek, but us country kids didn’t have much else to do for fun in the early 1990’s!

This excitement has never left me and it was reignited when I heard about the ‘Foodie Penpals’ scheme. If you haven't heard about Foodie Penpals before and if you too ever had Penpals as a kid, then you must check this out! Basically, it's a scheme that was started over in the USA at The Lean Green Bean blog, which has kindly been brought to the UK & Europe by Carol Anne over at This is Rock Salt. The simple idea behind the scheme is that foodie bloggers (and their readers) get to know each other by exchanging lovely foodie parcels in the mail each month, with a limit of £10 per box. Each month Carol Anne pairs you up with a new person to send a parcel to, and in turn you receive a package from someone else. I have been taking part in the scheme for about 8 months so far and have met lots of great people along the way, discovering their blogs and scoffing the delicious boxes that they’ve made for me! This is partly why I haven’t blogged about it before – I tend to rip open the box the minute it arrives, eat a lot of the contents – only to realise that I didn’t take any pictures and all I have left is crumbs and some non-immediately ready to eat items. This month I had a little more decorum…

I received my parcel from a foodie blog reader called Saskia, from The Netherlands. One word for this month’s parcel – WOW. I know it’s not all about quantity, but firstly what a haul – so generous! Saskia put so much thought into my parcel as I am on a bit of a weird diet at the moment, she really went to lots of trouble to ensure that I could use everything that she sent. Thank you so much Saskia, for the time and effort that you put in :)

Ta dah!!

Inside my amazing box there was a hand-written letter and the following goodies:

- A bag of Holland Superfruit, a mixture of delicious berries and pecan nuts

- Some Dutch Rock Salt

- Some beautiful Napkins

- Some sugar free Fruity Lollies

- Some sugar free Orange Sweeties

- Some Herbs used for flavouring roast potatoes

- Two different kinds of Tea – ‘Frise start’ which is apparently great to have with breakfast, and another yummy herbal tea named after Little Red Riding Hood

- Some Dried Melon

- Last but not least, some Dutch flag chocolates

To check out the package that I sent to my Foodie Penpal, go over and take a look at Sarah’s blog (Wilbur’s Mum) here! I’m so happy she liked it all! :)

For more info and to join in, please take a look here and sign up!