Customer Reviews

Picture Yourself Cooking With Your Kids

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Oh, What a great cookbook! I own over 3,000 cookbooks, several for children (our daughter is 6), and this is one of the best. Excellent recipes, teachable nutrition facts, and helpful hints. I highly recommend it!

I'm so impressed by this book. The recipes are not the standard kid-fare. They are healthy, tasty, wonderful recipes that will teach your kids to enjoy the real flavor of fresh foods and home cooking. There are photos of the foods being prepared--awesome for those who tend to second guess or wonder if they are doing things right. I'm going to buy a few more copies for friends.

This is a great cookbook. It contains much more than recipes, though. This book really teaches a healthy lifestyle, and includes strategies for passing that lifestyle on to your kids. Americans have largely embraced a fast-paced, fast-food lifestyle that encourages us to eat massive quantities of empty calories. This book offers helpful strategies to avoid these bad habits, without being preachy or sounding like the hippie handbook.
The recipes are great, too. The pancakes in particular are fabulous- healthy, tasty, great texture. My husband made them with our 2-year-old niece, and they had a blast. It was a simple enough recipe for her to be able to "help" a fair amount. All the recipes involve easy measurements, so kids of all ages can help in varying degrees.

This cookbook has been a great find. It's not a cutsie cookbook filled with a bunch of recipes involving lots of sugar or smiley faces on the food. It's not a cookbook you hand off to your children and tell them to get going. No, it's a cookbook that's for the both of you or the whole family. It's also a good read (those of you who love cookbooks will know what I'm talking about.)

The author designed this cookbook to involve kids in the whole process - learning about how food is grown and how it is brought to market, making good nutritional choices, basic cooking techniques, making the kitchen kid-friendly, age appropriate cooking, how to use appliances, etc. The author educates the adults in a friendly way so they can turn around and involve/teach the children.

What I'm trying to say is that Picture Yourself Cooking With Your Kids is more than recipes, although there are plenty of those.

The format of the book is kid-friendly with plenty of pictures, instructions, "try this" boxes, notes, and "tip" boxes, For example, the Lemon Rosemary Chicken recipe has a "freezes well" icon, 4 pictures , info on the time it takes to make and the time it takes altogether including baking, the nutritional information, ingredients, directions, and a Cook's Tip box. I appreciate that the recipes are for food that is good for my family. Light and Fluffy Oat Pancakes, Gobble It Up Turkey Kabobs, Squish Squash Soup, Pizza Your Way, Savory Cheese and Scallion Scones, and Ginger Applesauce Cake are a few of the recipes.

There are cookbooks out there with easier recipes, but this cookbook is about learning to cook real meals and learning skills that will last a lifetime. It's about sharing experiences, adult and child, in the spirit of adventure and cooperation.

The foodie enthusiasm, the "Cook's Tips," the emphasis on whole and healthy and FUN recipes appeal to big kids, too. We've had the book sitting casually in the living room at our bed and breakfast for the last month: "Where can I get this book?" Our own two grown-up kids made breakfast from it for us--that was quite a pleasure!

Picture yourself in the kitchen cooking with children at hand: parents and kids learn how to develop cooperative methods to develop tasty food from scratch in a book designed to involve kids not just in the kitchen, but from start to finish: menu plans, grocery shopping, basic cooking skills, and food safety. Recipes focus on fresh ingredients and are embellished with color photos and easy step-by-step instructions, making this a perfect guide for parents and kids to follow.