Honest Pretzels

Mollie Katzen is a cookbook rock star - love ALL of her books, but her children's cookbooks are amazing!

I'm a teacher of children aged 8-10 years old, and we are collectively very picky about the cookbooks we choose to use in the classroom. For this age group, the recipes can't be too easy or "babyish" -- not just a smoothie or a sandwich, which my would-be chefs already mastered years ago. But they also can't be so complicated that a group cannot complete them with minimal adult supervision, within a timeframe that suits a child's more limited attention span. (I tend to budget double the time it'd take me to make it on my own, when cooking with children...and even the most mature kids begin dropping like flies around the 90 minute mark.) There needs to be enough text to thoroughly explain steps and terms adult cooks might take for granted (which also helps if the adult helpers themselves aren't 100% confident cooks, which is common!). But the text can't be so complex that it overshoots its intended audience by a few grade levels (so many books these days, particularly celebrity-written tomes, are pitched at small children in their tone and illustrations, but are written on an 8th grade reading level, guaranteeing they'll gather dust). Needless to say, it's incredibly tough to find cookbooks for kids that meet my teacher criteria. Mollie Katzen's book (as well as her other titles for kids, like Pretend Soup) sets the standard for the type of books I look for in my classroom, and I wish there were more authors like her. She's road-tested every recipe with the target audience; included a wide range of recipes suitable for every course of the meal; and included sections for grown-ups as well as sections for kids for the perfect combination of clarity and simplicity. (I've even taken a page from her playbook when writing my own curriculum and recipes for other educators interested in using food in the classroom.) I return to these recipes over and over again, and gladly use them with my students. If I were Goldilocks, Katzen's cookbooks for kids would be my definition of "just right!"

Had gedacht dat het leuker zou zijn vanwege de goede recensies op de amerikaanse amazon. Vind de recepten erin niet erg origineel, de kinderen vonden het ook niet echt leuk.

This is the best kid cookbook I've seen, great step-by-step recipes that turn out tasty, easy to use with kids at your elbow. It neatly divides recipe tasks into those for the adult and those for the kid. And the kid actualy has enough to do to keep them involved the whole way.

This book does everything right: healthy, clear recipes with authentic ingredients. Each recipe has an introduction that explains the concepts (such as "Fried rice is basically stir-fried vegetables with cooked rice added"). I love the thought of a child learning how to make tortilla chips out of tortillas. Also, I love the thought of children mastering important basic recipes -- whether it's macaroni and cheese or scrambled eggs or banana bread. And there are lots of practical, creative-yet-simple lunch ideas -- grilled cheese and broccoli sandwich, for example, or macaroni minnestrone. All the things that other kid-cookbooks do wrong, this one does right.