Marica at Keeping the Castle (a blog full of homemaking tips and ideas) has some recommendations for cookbooks designed for children who want to join in and help. Her suggestions are Emeril’s There’s a Chef in My Soup!
I haven’t seen any of these books (though the Green Eggs and Ham Cookbook looks good), so these comments aren’t aimed at these three, but I find that cookbooks designed for children tend to make cakes shaped like hedgehogs, or pizza with a smiley face, rather than real food. I haven’t yet seen a cookery book designed for a vegetarian coeliac chef who happens to be under 12. (Hey, gap in the market! Note to self: must go and write book …).
As previously mentioned, all my children like to cook, whether coeliac or not. The book my coeliac daughter most often chooses to cook from is Totally Flour-Free Baking
In our very popular books, the pictures are covered in sticky guck. That’s a good recommendation too …
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I’ve written a book summarising what we’ve learnt over 20 years of dealing with the gluten free diet, and it might be just what you’re looking for. It packs the lessons we’ve learned into what I hope is a helpful and straightforward guidebook. It’s available on Amazon, as a paperback or for your Kindle… |
Hi Lucy, How’d you get your children to like cooking? I gotta get tips from you. I’d like mine to someday be able to wield a pan effiiciently (and I don’t mean like a baseball bat ;) ).
I have not seen that Totally Flour-Free Baking book first hand, but it is nice to see another book out that targets the celiac community and includes pictures of each recipe. When I self-published my Gluten-Free & Wheat-Free Gourmet Desserts recipe cookbook, I insisted on doing it in full color and including a picture of each and every recipe exactly as it appears when it is completed, as well as some “Step” pictures for some recipes.
Seeing the finished product really helps with recipe selection as you have stated, Lucy. I’m sorry my book is not available through Amazon though, so you will not have a way to do an aff-link to it. Hmmm… maybe you should just stock a few of my books and sell them to people in the UK? :)
Mike, your book looks fantastic – and another one to come, I see. I’m very tempted to take up your suggestion of reselling your books – but the shipping costs are very high to get them here to the UK. It’s obviously heavy! (All those good quality photos …)
Hi Maricar – the children started by cooking sweet things (cookies etc) and have only just moved on to savoury. We started by cooking together, and I’ve gradually done less and less. It helps a lot when they can read and understand a recipe.
My next step is to train them to wash up after themselves – still, baby steps.