Book Review - Ready, Steady, Spaghetti

I will start my review by saying that my daughter (6 1/2) loves to cook and loves to browse for recipes. She collects cookbooks and sometimes even steals my cookbooks and cooking magazines. Needless so say, I was excited to receive yet another cookbook to add to her collection, and I was very interested to see what she thought of it.

My daughter is a huge fan of the Annabel Karmel cookbooks and already has a couple of those, so I was on some level comparing this recipe book to the ones that she has. We flipped through the cookbook together. A small number of the recipes were definite must tries, a few were definite never tries (chicken noodle omelet?) and there were a few old standbys the appear in just about every cookbook imaginable. (scrambled eggs, anyone?) Not that I have anything against recipes for scrambled eggs in a children's cookbook. However I haven't noticed scrambled eggs necessarily being a real hit in my household and I liked the idea in one of our other cookbooks of making a "sun" out of pieces of toast surrounding the scrambled eggs and calling them "sunny eggs", which turned plain old scrambled eggs and whole wheat toast into a feast for the eyes, so to speak.

An issue I had with the book is that safety was not emphasized enough. I understand that 6 is not the age group that this book is aimed at, but even for eight and nine year old's, it would still be a good idea to emphasize the need for adult supervision.

In short the book had beautiful pictures which to my mind had more of a visual appeal to adults than to children, some interesting recipes (the coconut ice was delicious and easy). What it lacked for children was more visual appeal geared towards a child's taste and more frequent warnings about food safety, and what it lacked from an adult perspective was more recipes designed to make healthy foods more appealing to the fussy eaters in their lives. (And please no recipes for hummus, you will not gets beans into either my daughter or her 4 year old brother so don't even try.)

In conclusion, I would say that even though I initially wondered whether my daughter would ever give this book back to me so I could actually look at it, but in the end she lost interest in it pretty quickly. (By contrast I'm still waiting for my "Taste of Home" Halloween special and would really like it back please.....)