Summer Reading 2015 Your Kids: Cooking!

The students at my school love cookbooks, so I am always interested when I see one written especially for kids. Your Kids Cooking! is not just a recipe book, but an entire program to teach young people the terms and skills needed to be successful in the kitchen. The program consists of the book, a DVD, and a website. The book contains 10 recipe lessons that build upon each other, so that kids learn 100 cooking skills, techniques, and terms by the end of the program. Within each lesson is the main recipe, an additional recipe of a similar dish for further practice, and a recipe for a sweet treat or snack to reward the chef for all the hard work. The DVD goes through a demonstration of the recipe step-by-step, and the website has 10 more recipes to accompany each lesson.

Within the book, each lesson is written up with kid-friendly directions and photos of the ingredients, utensils, and the steps of the recipe. Information includes how many the recipe will serve, the amount of prep time needed, suggestions for completing the meal (side dishes), "Easy-Fix Options" (such as buying frozen meatballs instead of making them from scratch), a shopping list and shopping tips, a MyPlate.gov breakdown of the nutrition for the dish and extra nutritional info (like the difference between regular and wholegrain pasta), and even interesting food facts from around the world. The beginning of the book includes a list of the utensils needed for each recipe and there is a buyer's guide on the website. The book also contains tips on kitchen safety, covering "sharp stuff, hot stuff, and germy stuff." The DVD has a segment on knife safety.

Pancake lovers know that you can order a short stack, if you aren't very hungry, or get the full stack. In this program, STACK stands for "Skills, Terms, and Cooking Know-How." By the time future chefs have completed Your Kids Cooking! they will have the tall STACK, for sure.

I read an e-book provided by the publisher through NetGalley. You can visit the website to see a sample lesson. You can also see what others are saying about the program by visiting the FaceBook page.