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Hungry to spice up your family’s meal plan? Ever feel like your staples have gone stale?
We searched out cookbooks to help satiate your needs — whether your wish list involves getting your kids more involved in cooking, finding recipes designed with your time and taste buds in mind, seeking options for those with special dietary needs or all of the above.
Salad People and More Real Recipes: A New Cookbook for Preschoolers & Up
By Mollie Katzen
Tricycle Press, 2005
It’s green, purple, red, yellow, orange and sweet and crunchy all over. Sounds like a sugary cereal? Not so fast. It’s Rainbow-Raisin Cole Slaw and features green and purple cabbage, red and yellow bell peppers, carrots and raisins.
Salad People’s 20 child-friendly recipes also include such delights as Corny Corn Cakes, Pesto-Macaroni Soup and the book’s namesake — Salad People — where your little chef can use fruit, vegetables, cheese, cooked pasta and yogurt or cottage cheese to build a person.
Each recipe includes instructions and tips for adults followed by a picture version for kids, where a few words accompany each image.
“A growing number of families around the country can attest to the enthusiasm with which young children will embrace healthy foods, like fruit, vegetables, soups, and salads, without needing to be lured by sugar, frosting, or gumdrops,” dishes author Mollie Katzen in the introduction. “Pure, good food carries its own appeal, an appeal that is enhanced many times over by the opportunity for an up-close, hands-on experience that ‘makes it happen.’”
Katzen makes such suggestions to parents as to “always use larger containers than you think necessary, so that there is plenty of elbow room and an insurance policy against spills.”
While Salad People is designed for the preschool set and beyond, Katzen doesn’t set an age “ceiling” and finds older kids and adults are also interested in the recipes. Salad People is the sequel to the book, Pretend Soup. This best selling author is also known for her vegetarian Moosewood Cookbook.
Katzen explains that cooking with kids offers benefits beyond the kitchen and says it also teaches early math skills and hand-eye coordination, encourages the development of patience, and builds self-confidence and a sense of teamwork.
Real Food for Healthy Kids: 200+ Easy, Wholesome Recipes
By Tracey Seaman and Tanya Wenman Steel
William Morrow, 2008
Along with such temptations as Carrot Cake Oatmeal, with shredded strips of carrots cooked into the breakfast classic, Real Food For Healthy Kids also serves up age-by-age nutritional guidelines, tips for expanding a picky eater’s palate and other valuable advice.
The recipe behind the book is the pairing of moms: Tracy Seaman, test kitchen director for Every Day with Rachael Ray magazine and Tanya Wenman Steel, editor-in-chief of epicurious.com and a regular Today show guest.
The authors, who are proponents of family meals, recognize that time is often limited and offer recipes that are easy to make and good for you.
“Recent studies show that families who eat together more often than the norm of a few times a week eat a healthier diet than those who don’t eat as a family much. Also, when those kids become teenagers, studies show they are less likely to get involved with drugs and alcohol, especially if there is consistent conversation before, during, and after the main meal as well,” write Seaman and Steel.
The recipes call for fresh and minimally processed ingredients. Some of the 200-plus entrees and munchies featured include Get-Well-Soon chicken soup, Chicken Cherries Jubilee with Goat Cheese, a Blueberry Cheesecake Smoothie for dessert and homemade granola bars. You’ll find a junior chef’s hat next to recipes that can be made with school-aged kids.
There is also a section dedicated to food sensitivities. It’s a topic that hits home for Seaman. Her autistic son follows a gluten-free and casein-free diet.
A portion of the book’s proceeds will benefit several organizations including autism non-profits and Feeding America, a food bank network formerly known as America’s Second Harvest.
Diabetes Snacks, Treats & Easy Eats for Kids: 130 Recipes for the Foods Kids Really Like to Eat
By Barbara Grunes
Surrey Books, 2006
Chocolate Chip Muffin Tops, Tea Party Peach Melba Cakes, Ice Cream Cone Cupcakes… Thumb through titles like these, and a cookbook for children with diabetes likely won’t pop into mind. Many of the recipes throughout Diabetes Snacks, Treats & Easy Eats for Kids call for the sugar substitute, Splenda, along with ingredients that help limit fat and cholesterol intake.
Each of the easy-to-make recipes, which can also be enjoyed by everyone in the family, includes a carbohydrate count and other nutritional values to help you follow your diabetic child’s meal plan. You’ll find such offerings as Vegetable Pancakes, Grilled Fruit Salad with Pineapple Chutney, and mini Whole-Wheat Pizza Cut-Outs where you can use a cookie cutter to make fun shapes or a drinking glass for circles.
Author and restaurant consultant, Barbara Grunes, a mom, wife, sister, daughter and friend to people with diabetes, has written more than 50 cookbooks, including an adult-geared partner book to this one.
In her introduction, she shares that diabetics now have better care and monitoring available as well as more food choices. “Recommended diets for those with diabetes have loosened up a lot from the old days,” she says. “For the most part, even sugary and rich foods are not forbidden. Children with diabetes can have sweets in moderate amounts as long as the sweet counts as part of their overall daily carbohydrate intake.”
Grunes emphasizes careful planning and encourages talking to your child’s doctor, registered dietician or certified diabetes educator about how to mix the recipes into the meal plan.
8 Degrees of Ingredients: For Those Suffering from Food Allergies, Sensitivities, and Intolerances, and the People Who Cook for Them.
By Melisa K. Priem
Beaver’s Pond Press, 2008
Author Melisa K. Priem tells the story of how whenever she talks to people about her daughter’s food allergies, “…the conversation always includes a discussion about another person’s allergy, intolerance, or sensitivity… to one or more of eight common ingredients.”
The eight culprits include wheat, soy, eggs, milk, peanuts, tree nuts, fish and shellfish. Each recipe in 8 Degrees of Ingredients avoids these ingredients along with gluten and dairy products.
Priem writes “…one out of every three people believes he or she has a food allergy, or modifies the family diet to accommodate someone with a perceived food allergy, intolerance or sensitivity.”
She shares 250 plus recipes for all kinds of comfort foods and classics, including ones that you would think someone with allergies would need to avoid. Instead of eggs and mayo, you can thank Yukon Gold potatoes for providing the creamy base in the Classic American Potato Salad. There is also an egg-less meat loaf.
At the top of the recipe for chocolate chip cookies, Priem announces, “It is every mother’s right to make her child homemade, chocolate chip cookies.” The recipe combines such ingredients as rice milk, shortening, xanthum gum, and a mix of sorghum, tapioca and potato flours to replace wheat, milk and eggs.
“Ignoring conventional kitchen wisdom has enabled me to create unique ingredient combinations that result in outcomes that are amazingly similar to their conventional counterparts,” says Priem, who hopes her recipes return some normalcy to those facing food challenges.
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