Release date: October 3, 2006 | Age Range: 9 and up
Learning to cook can be fun and easy! This cookbook is for kids, but beginning cooks of all ages will love the simple and delicious recipes for every meal--all with only three ingredients each.
With more than 100 easy-to-follow recipes, kids can prepare breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, desserts and more, while learning about fresh ingredients and simple cooking techniques. From the best peanut butter and jelly sandwich to crunchy wasabi salmon, young cooks will gain confidence as they prepare homemade soups, delicious macaroni and cheese, and a heavenly chocolate mousse cake.
Award-winning chef and author Rozanne Gold inspires everyone to get cooking! Using her signature, keep-it-simple approach to cooking with fresh, natural ingredients, you won't need a gourmet kitchen or any experience to get started. With just 1-2-3 ingredients per recipe, you can make amazingly creative meals and feel like a very accomplished cook.
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Rozanne Gold, renowned chef, author and international food and restaurant consultant, began her career at age 23 as first chef to New York Mayor Ed Koch. Considered one of the most prominent women in the food world, she is a four-time winner of the prestigious James Beard Award and winner of the IACP/Julia Child Cookbook Award.
As Chef-Director of the restaurant consulting group, the Joseph Baum & Michael Whiteman Co., she helped re-create New York's magical Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center (where she was co-owner and consulting chef for 15 years), the legendary Windows on the World, and three of New York's three-star restaurants.
The author of 12 acclaimed cookbooks, Ms. Gold has been the entertaining columnist for Bon Appetit magazine where her "Entertaining Made Easy" column was read by five million fans. She has written and produced stories for The New York Times (her work can be found on the Op-Ed page, the Dining Section, and Sunday Magazine), and has written for Oprah, Gourmet, Cooking Light, More, FoodArts, Modern Maturity and The Montessori Magazine.
As Chef to Mayor Koch, Ms. Gold cooked for President Jimmy Carter, Prime Minister Menachem Begin and dignitaries from all walks of life. Business Week named her a "Mover and Shaker"; Cooking Light magazine named her one of "America's Top 5 Enlightened Chefs"; Chef magazine nominated her "Innovator of the Year"; the Food & Beverage Association of America honored her as 'Hospitality Professional of the Year" and Drexel University deemed her Distinguished Visiting Professor.
Known as the "diva of simplicity", she has set the Gold Standard for a style of cooking that has inspired professional chefs and home cooks alike to "keep it simple" with: Little Meals: A Great New Way to Eat and Cook (1994), Recipes 1-2-3: Fabulous Food Using Only Three Ingredients (1996), published in four languages; Recipes 1-2-3 Menu Cookbook (1998), Entertaining 1-2-3 (1999) and Healthy 1-2-3 (2001). Desserts 1-2-3 (2002) landed on the L.A. Times "Hot List" and was chosen one of the year's best cookbooks by Food & Wine Magazine. Cooking 1-2-3 (2003) was chosen as one of the year's best 10 books on NBC's Today Show.
Gold's books have garnered starred reviews from Publisher's Weekly and chosen as Editor's Selections in the New York Times Book Review. Her seminal book, Healthy 1-2-3 won the coveted IACP award, was nominated for a James Beard award, and chosen as "one of the year's best books" by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Known as a food-trends pundit, Ms. Gold invents concepts that give restaurants and food companies their competitive edge. An early proponent of American regional cooking, she helped create American Spoon Foods, the first specialty food company to focus on regional ingredients. She invented Hudson River Cuisine, turning the idea into a three-star restaurant, the Hudson River Club; and was responsible for developing New York's first pan-Mediterranean restaurant (Café Greco), featuring "Med-Rim Cuisine".
Ms. Gold is a frequent guest on national television, including four recent appearances on the Today Show and is a regular guest on National Public Radio. A recent appearance on WNYC's "Leonard Lopate Show" won her a fourth James Beard Award.
A graduate of Tufts University with honors in psychology and education, Ms. Gold studied cooking in Italy and France. She is past President of Les Dames d'Escoffier, New York, and is a trustee of Arts Horizons, a nonprofit organization that brings the arts to city schools. She is a major proponent of the movement to help teens eat more healthfully and has just published her 11th book -- "Eat Fresh Food: Awesome Recipes for Teen Chefs" (Bloomsbury USA, October 2009.) Gold lives with her husband and teenage daughter in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Her son Jeremy Whiteman lives in Silicon Valley.
Since I have and love Rozanne Gold's entire Cooking 1-2-3 series, so I got Kids Cook to keep my series complete. Let me say, this is a wonderful cookbook for kids or adults. The book does not condescend to aspiring young cooks, but offers lots of useful start up directions, and 1-2-3 simple recipes. For more experienced cooks, there are more easy to use, but flavors to think about recipes. I can't wait to try all of them.
From my early years, I cooked a lot. Starting in fifth grade, I had a budget and full responsibility for our family of five's dinner every Wednesday, from shopping to cleanup. Mostly I used the Fannie Farmer cookbook.
Realizing many contemporary young people lack such background and are unaccustomed to food preparation, I think this book's idea of good recipes that appear unintimidating is excellent. The appearance however is deceptive, the execution, inadequate.
A book intended for children needs to be written and edited so children themselves can absorb its information at their level of experience. Rozanne Gold's book offers a selection of delicious, real foods children will enjoy and enjoy sharing, but not the care required to impart necessary directions
Making this cookbook actually work for children wouldn't take a whole lot of effort. As it is, it guides adults who want to cook with children more effectively than it meets the needs of children themselves.
Although illustrated, it's sophisticated style may appeal to the rare child, but not to children in general, and the small type is neither inviting, nor, particularly on the orange and fruit smoothie blue background pages, easy to read. Swapping some of the generous empty space for larger print would help. But beyond visual appearance, the information itself needs to be redone with children in mind. Seriously.
Besides the fact that many children fail to read introductions at all, this book's introduction, containing the main part of its minimal safety precautions and disclaimers, takes way too much for granted.... It warns,"be sure you have a parent or kitchen buddy to help you," but if this book is intended for inexperienced children, specifying safety directions within recipes more frequently would be prudent.
It does warn children "to read a recipe slowly and carefully all the way through before you get stated" which, of course, is always wise, but the recipes themselves could ensure better advance comprehension if equipment were listed instead of tucked into directions (how disappointing to find the zest grated from three lemons, sugar and buttermilk won't become sorbet if an unavailable ice cream maker, required in the last line, was overlooked. Well, the tomato sorbet for the shrimp cocktail earlier in the book didn't need one, how was I to know. . . )It's asking a lot really.
Diagrams and more thorough instructions for many procedures would be sensible. Say it's a nine year old's first encounter with a "large knife", is it adequate to instruct, "cut the carrots in half across the width. Cut the slender half lengthwise into 4 long pieces?" Instead of the pretty sketch of a carrot, how about a diagram showing the carrot flat side down being cut as directed? A line drawing of the "slit down the entire length of the tenderloin, leaving 1 inch on each end uncut" would help a child who's never considered such a maneuver before too.
How does the child determine the skillet IS "hot."
How are young cooks supposed to tell how much more kosher salt to add to their boiling water until it "tastes as salty as the ocean?"
I'd like steps built into the numerous poultry recipes to minimize the possibility of salmonella contamination.
How does a small person know how to "remove" a roast chicken from the oven the first time, or "transfer" it to a cutting board?
Then in the confusing directions for making quick gravy, do we have the child pouring hot fat from the roasting pan through the strainer into the small saucepan, or has it cooled? Approximately how long might it take for the juices to thicken and how thick might a child think is right without some approximation or description? And what the heck is the young novice to make of "If using butter, add a tablespoon of cold butter to enrich the sauce" (it's sauce now, not gravy) if our recipe hasn't said we ARE using butter or not, and do we plop the cold butter right into the boiling juices and splash ourselves?
Similarly, why are no tips given for pouring hot jelly into the 8X8 pan?
I wonder how long it might take, and how committed a child would need to be, to "scrape the peel [of a 4-inch piece of ginger] away with the edge of a spoon. "
What size do we suppose "a medium-sized bowl" might be?
If a child has not prepared a fresh avocado before, is it reasonable to begin instructions "scoop the avocado flesh from the hard skin" with no hints on how to open it and remove the pit?
Children might even need to be told to cut off scallion roots, not simply to discard the green part and chop the white part.
Details about the round of parchment for the springform pan would be nice.
If the young chef is not to let the brown butter turn black, it would be a good idea to mention how. (And couldn't more of the recipes use olive oil in place of so much butter?)
Reminding children their fondue cherries still have pits would be thoughtful. A little advice on "transferring" the molten chocolate to the fondue pot would be wise as well.
"Cook it until it is reduced by half" needs a bit more explanation, and I'm not even going to tell you about the two-sentence explanation for separating eggs. . .
Is it enough support to tell a child faced with a fresh pineapple only " Cut the pineapple into little cubes (about 1/4 inch)"?
These are only a few examples. I'm not trying to pick on these splendid recipes but they just won't do; they need to be thought through better for children to use independently.
Having only three ingredients per recipe implies manageable simplicity, but many of these recipes are more complicated than one might expect. Take oatmeal, for example: After cooking the cider syrup for 25 minutes, or arranging to rewarm it if it was made ahead, "cook [oats] over medium heat for five minutes, stirring frequently. Add 2 tablespoons of the heavy cream. Cook for 1 or 2 minutes longer, until the oatmeal is the desired thickness. Meanwhile, whip the remaining cream using a wire whisk. . . until soft peaks form" --pretty demanding for even an experienced cook to finesse and still "serve immediately."
How about divulging first-time tips on dividing ground meat into 12 or 16 evenly sized balls or the puff pastry sheets into 12 pieces.
Some of the ingredients are unlikely to be on hand. Some may be unfamiliar, and essential information is omitted:
How much is in a bunch of fresh mint anyway, in case we're picking our own?
okay, we know we need 5.2 ounces of Boursin cheese, but do we know what to look for at the grocery store? Comté? Even fresh goat cheese seems a little mysterious with no further comments.
garlic oil?
Sometimes less is more, but here it's not.
Kids Cook 1-2-3 claims it is "easy to follow," but it needs more complete, more careful instructions. It really does.Read more ›
There are other simpler books on kids' cooking on the market, but this may be the first comprehensive beginning child's cookbook, offering not the usual sampler but over a hundred easily-followed, kid-friendly recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks and beyond. Instructions teach about the value of fresh ingredients as they follow all the basics, from sandwiches to homemade soups and even an easy chocolate mousse cake. No color photos, but the drawings by Sara Pinto are fun embellishments.
I found Oleanna's review the most thorough and helpful. My 3rd grader brought this book from the school library, and I was hooked. For the dinner that night I made 4 recipes from the book. The recipes themselves are very good and I liked the small number of ingredients, yet great variety of the ingredients, highlighting tastes of each. However, this book is definitely not for a novice cook, nor for a child to perform on their own. After saying the above, I would be quite happy to add this book to our cookbook library, just so that *I* can whip up a few dishes for dinner :)
This book is great on many levels: The recipes all taste GOOD--I make these dishes for my family (even without a child's help!) and am grateful for their simplicity, especially at the end of a long day. Kids aged 9 and up can really do these by themselves. The selections are nutritious and use the best ingredients. The book isn't full of silly gimmicks to make the food look cute or to hide the vegetables. I like it so much that I have bought it as a gift for others. I like the author's other 1-2-3 books, but this is by far her best. Go for it!
This wonderful book really motivated the young recipient to explore cooking and to develop an appreciation for food and how ingredients come together to make a yummy and healthy meal
My daughter found this book in the library and wanted to purchase one. She was very excited to start cooking some meals on her own or with a guiding hand. The book is very creative and has some great recipes. I've used it myself! It's a fun way to get children interested in cooking as well.
