23/09/2010 21:42:00
Cooking With Kids by Erin & Tatum Quon
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This is so far one of my favourite kids-doing-the-cooking cookbooks.
It's a nice hard back book, beautifully laid out, heavy on colour and the photographs make you properly hungry.
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But two things stand out for me:
1. It doesn't try to suggest that very young children can do every job in every recipe, but says that "each recipe features steps written just for children so they can follow along with a little help from mum and dad". How they do this is to put a little chefs hat next to any instructions which a child can complete themselves. This is a little similar to the recipes in the Foodies Books where grown up helper tasks are flagged up. I like this approach because there is clearly something for a child to do in every recipe, but the inclusion of sharp and hot things allows for a quite wide variety of recipes. The child can watch you complete the other more hazardous steps and take in the methods for the time they can do them for themselves.
2. There is a REALLY good variety of recipe types - breakfast, snacks, main meals, puds and bakes. There's a nice balance between health and attractiveness, and a fairly wide range of nutrients throughout the book. It's great to have home made chicken nuggets, but chicken chow mein, potpies and filo fish fingers makes a nice change.
Some of the ingredients are a bit expensive or tricky to get locally (edamame, anyone?) but on the whole it's pretty accessible and doesn't require too much experience or confidence from the adult helper.
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We have cooked a few things from this book and they have all come out well so far. Jacob cooked the Filo Fish Fingers for the family recipe test on this blog and it got an average mark of 8 out of 10.
Plus it looked really cool. There's a slightly quirky take in this book (french toast cut into squares with a blueberry sauce, grilled cheese sarnies with a tomato soup dip, biscuit lollies) which makes it a bit more fun than the average kids cookbook.
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