Food Adventures, by Elisabeth Luard and Frances Boswell, starts with a chapter on spoon-foods and purees and evolves with a growing child into chapters on experimenting with around-the-world dinner plates. Japanese miso, a French omelette, and Moroccan couscous are made simply and palatable to the seven-year-old, but still delicious to the grown-up. Luard and Boswell eschew baby foods from boxes and jars and suggest that kids learn more about food when they eat a little of what their parents do.
Kitchen Playdates, by Lauren Bank Deen, dedicates her cookbook to parents who miss the dinner parties and extravagant meals of a life before children. Her solution? Keep the parties, lose the kids. Just kidding. You can keep ‘em both. Invite friends over, make it a pizza party, let things get messy and use ingredients that everyone will agree taste delicious. Cool ideas, like creating a ‘celebrity chef’ cooking video starring an aunt and her favourite recipe, will get even surly pre-teens and picky vegetable-haters involved.
Written by teenage sisters, Megan and Jill Carle, Teens Cook: How to Cook What You Want to Eat has got all the surefire youth hits (tuna melt, potato skins, taco salad) pared down to a few easy steps with an emphasis on healthy ingredients. A few more experimental recipes (Grilled Portobello Sandwichees or the Frozen Bananas with Chocolate and Toffee) throw teenagers a challenge when they’re ready to try it. With Megan as resident vegetarian and Jill all about the comfort foods, the book balances healthy, crunchy stuff with good ol’ greasy and somewhere in there, teens will find something they love to make that doesn’t come from a can, bag, or box.
The River Cottage Family Cookbook is peppered with photos of sticky-fingered kids of all ages tossing pancakes and icing cakes; nine-year-old Mack even guts a fish on page 227. Facts on the history of cocoa, dairy cows, and raising chickens will add a little education to the fun of getting your hands dirty. This hefty book looks like it could survive even the roughest gaggle of kids attempting their own eggs and scones on a hungry morning. And grown-ups will appreciate the beautiful photography and lovely prose.
Whatever the age of your children, all the books share the idea that cooking with kids can be chaotic, quite messy, and heck of a lot of fun. All titles can be purchased at (or ordered through) Plenty in Victoria, Barbara Jo's in Vancouver, or on Amazon.
Photo reprinted with permission from The River Cottage Family Cookbook by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall & Fizz Carr, copyright © 2008. Published by Ten Speed Press.
Photo credit: Simon Wheeler © 2008
