Kid Cookbook Reviews

With all the cooking we do at our house, I thought it was time to do some kid cookbook reviews. We don’t really use them that much though.  My children either like to use my recipes or they like to create their own dishes.  It’s much more fun to add some spices and look like a real chef than to measure everything out with a measuring spoon and cup. You can tell, if you’ve cooked with your children very much, if one of your recipes will be something they can handle.

We have gotten a few cookbooks out of the library like Rachael Ray’s Cooking Rocks.  There were a few good recipes in there, but many times I didn’t have the ingredients on hand.  I saw Paula Deen’s My First Cookbook today and was excited to see pictures, but then my excitement was dashed when there were only pictures of the ingredients and supplies that you needed and not how to actually put the recipe together.  The recipe instructions were still written in paragraph form!  I don’t know if the publishers thought that children would need help reading anyways and didn’t want to include pictures there or not.  A cookbook with pictures (even cartoons) of what you need AND what you do with what you have, would be great.

I recently had a chance to look at Emeril’s There’s a Chef in My Family.  The subtitle says “Recipes to Get Everybody Cooking.” It sounds like it would be right up my alley with getting family members involved in the kitchen making memories.  There are big and colorful cartoon-type pictures with interesting recipes.  It looks like about half of the recipes use ingredients you already have, but the others need special ingredients.

Sneaky Chef - Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods In Kids Favorite Meals, is not a cookbook for children, but it relates to cooking for children.  I’m reading it right now. It goes right along with Deceptively Delicious that I read last summer. I think Sneaky Chef came out first, though.  Deceptively Delicious taught me that I could puree food and sneak it into all kinds of dishes.  When one of my children heard me telling my friends about this great cookbook that I bought she has become the rather paranoid “vegetable police” by coming into the kitchen all the time asking me what I was putting in our food.  I like to cook a whole head of cauliflower, butternut squash, etc.  Then I puree it and put 1/2 cup portions in sandwich bags or freezer containers.  My family never notices when I put pureed cauliflower in with our mashed potatoes.  It’s really fun to sneak things in and then have the satisfaction of seeing my family eat vegetables without even knowing it:)). Sneaky Chef shows you how to make up about 6 different purees (if you want to) that you can have on hand in the freezer to plop into many dishes and desserts.  The recipes show you how to take normal kid favorite recipes and include some extra vegetables that no one will taste.

Let me know if you have any kids cookbooks that you have found that you like and I’ll consider posting a review here.