Budding young cooks will be excited by the variety of healthy and fun vegetarian meals that are incredibly easy to make. Each recipe is carefully put together by an expert author and there is a nutritionist on board to check there's a balance of vitamins, minerals, protein, and carbohydrates throughout the book. Studies have shown that lowering your meat intake can be incredibly beneficial for you and your child's health as well as helping the environment. Food fact files and helpful tips throughout the book give advice on how to achieve a balanced diet, ensuring every nutritional need is covered for growing young minds and bodies. The pre-teen and teenager categories are often forgotten, but this all-encompassing vegetarian cookbook fills that gap by suggesting foods that will help with concentration, developing hormones, and overall mental well-being.
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You can always count on DK books to be full of information and gorgeous illustrations. Or in this case, also beautiful photographs. This one starts out with an in-depth look at the kitchen, tools, and safety rules for being in there. And there is a thorough discussion of how to eat properly on a vegetarian diet. A lot more people are going the vegetarian or vegan route, so kids need to be educated on that and have ideas for foods they can make for themselves. I love the descriptions of the different foods and why each one is good for you to include in your diet. (Psst! Parents could learn a lot from this, too!)
The first recipe is Avocado mash on sourdough toast. People like to scoff and call that a Millennial breakfast. I'm here to tell you that I'm far from being a Millennial and this has been one of my favorite breakfasts since before it became super trendy. But I haven't tried this version, yet.
I defy you to not get hungry as you page through this book. Every single recipe has a huge photo of the finished product that is so vibrant, you just want to reach right into the page and grab it to try. Some of the recipes also have the individual ingredients pictured along the edges to help kids identify those components. Each recipe includes clear instructions about how to make each one.
A lot of the recipes do require some cooking and baking, plus a lot of cutting and chopping. So your child should be older and used to the kitchen if preparing independently. I would still recommend being close by while they are working. Younger children can easily help with some aspect of each of these recipes, though.
You're covered for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack times. A couple of these could also double as a healthy dessert. And then there is a delectable dessert section at the end.
Even if you are not a vegetarian or a child, you're going to want to add this cookbook to your collection, because these recipes are fantastic.
Thank you to the publisher for fulfilling my review request via NetGalley. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
