Cookbooks for Kids

Greetings!
One of my hobbies is cooking. I enjoy trying new recipes and tweaking ones that I regularly use. It seems that food and cooking has become more popular in the last ten years or so and has given rise to a couple of TV networks and cookbooks galore. Recently two different television cooking competition shows had child chefs competing for prizes.

COOKBOOKS
We have a great chance to introduce students to the joy of cooking for themselves and their families simply by placing cookbooks in our libraries for students to check out and use at home.
I really like cookbooks for children. I especially like when the directions are written simply and clearly with pictures to illustrate the process. Here are a few that we have at Rogers.

Paula Deen and other celebrity chefs have written cookbooks for children. These two have been quite popular at our school. Paula Deen’s My First Cookbook and Paula Deen’s Cookbook for the Lunch-Box Set.

The Children’s Step-By-Step Cookbook is one that I particularly like. The illustrations are colorful photographs and the directions for each recipe are very easy to follow. You can see that my copy is mended and this is the best of two copies that I have!

If you want vegetarian cookbooks, here are two that are just for kids. Cooking with Herb the Vegetarian Dragon, The Jumbo Vegetarian Cookbook, (in the next photo) and Kids Can Cook.

The Sleepover Cookbook, The Ultimate Kid-approved Cookbook, and Tasty School Lunches are all great options, as well.

COOKING CONTEST
One of our classrooms has a number of aspiring chefs and a couple of months ago they wanted to hold a cooking or baking contest like they have seen on TV. After a lot of planning and scheduling, they held their Cupcake Bake-off here last Friday. They came up with a rubric for the judges to use regarding flavor, creativity, frosting constancy, and more. The whole class divided into teams and got baking in our Commons area. This happens to be right outside my office area, so I had to smell cupcakes baking all morning. Near the end of the morning I went to the office to get my mail and was handed a judging form and happily had to taste the cupcakes.

The kids had a great time and learned quite a bit along the way.

FOOD MAGAZINES FOR KIDS
I wondered if there were any food magazines for kids and went searching online. Can you believe it? There are three. Chop, Chop, Yum for Kids, and Ingredient. I ordered all three to try them out to see if they are something I could recommend and put in the library. I got Ingredient right away along with the back issues I ordered and I really like it.

The January/February 2014 issue has
• an article about clementine oranges
• a short history of the scurvy problem sailors had in the 1700’s
• New York City’s attempt to ban soda
• sesame seeds and where they come from
• traveling to Alaska and the experiences with wildlife and also the food
• a history of chewing gum
• a young chef (age 13) and her newly released cookbook
• the nose and the science of smelling and tasting
• the subtitle of Ingredient is “a magazine for kids curious about food”
• there are recipes, but they do not fill the magazine. This issue has four recipes.

If you are looking for a food magazine for kids, you might ask for a sample issue and try this one out.

I hope you have a great week.

Audrey

PS. I went to pull out all the children’s cookbooks to photograph for you, and had not realized how many we have. I DID NOT show you all that we have, but less than half of what we have. It is a little bit embarrassing, but I justified myself with the fact that we have a lot of students. I want to encourage you to have a few children's cookbooks in your library if you don’t already have some. Now, I really do not need any more children’s cookbooks, but if you have one that you think I might like, I’m sure I can talk myself into getting another!