Author(s): Mollie Katzen, Ann L. Henderson
Publisher: Tricycle Press
Publication Date: 1994-03-01
Pages: 96
Review: Besides providing easy-to-make and appealing recipes, this clearly-illustrated book teaches reading and counting skills. It’s a marvelous book. My granddaughter made popovers for her first dish, and everyone loved them.I love this book. It is really helpful if you are a preschool teacher. The pictures help with sequencing and literacy developement. The recipes taste good, too.My daughter, at almost eight, is about ready to graduate to a more difficult cookbook, so it seems like a good time to look back and review the book that started her kitchen explorations.
Pretend Soup is a charmer — a very straightforward cookbook you can use with even the youngest kids. Katzen includes some baking - popovers, “surprise” muffins with berries tucked inside, etc. - well as side dishes like glazed carrots and sauteed zucchini. There are some “no cook” recipes as well, like smoothies, fruit dip, homemade soda pop, and fruit kabobs.
Recipes include a grown-up section with standard recipe format, including ingredient lists and measurements, and a kid section with very simple instructions and step-by-step drawings showing what to do. Nota bene — READ THE GROWN-UP SECTION BEFORE YOU START! My husband learned this the hard way — the kid instructions aren’t complete.
Everything tastes pretty good, and it’s all made with real ingredients, no processed foods or canned frosting or some of the other nonsense you’ll find in other kid cookbooks. If anything, it errs on the side of being a little TOO virtuous — my daughter wanted to make the carrot pennies and zucchini coins, but she wasn’t interested in eating them! It’s also all vegetarian, if that matters to you. There are plenty of helpful tips on kitchen safety, and on how to relax and let the kids do it themselves, even if they make a mess. Parents will enjoy the quotes from Katzen’s panel of young testers at the start of each recipe.
It’s a great way for very young kids to learn how to have fun in the kitchen. Take the “preschoolers” in the title seriously — mid-elementary students who can read on their own might find it babyish. I got Pretend Soup and Salad People for my four-year-old niece for Christmas, along with a child’s pink apron and chef’s hat. They were a hit! She really likes to help in the kitchen and I looked at a lot of childrens’ cooking books before deciding on these. Other books required the child to be a reader already or had lots of recipes for desserts and sweets and such. These books seemed to have healthier recipes in them than some of the others on the market.
The layout for these books is this: each recipe is four pages long. The first two pages are for the adult involved to read. The second two pages are simply drawn step-by-step visual instructions for the child to follow. Mollie Katzen does the artwork in these books and it’s very charming.
M. Katzen has another book for children, Honest Prezels, which I think is for a little older crowd…maybe eight or so…I look forward to getting that one for my niece when she’s ready for it.Pretend Soup (and Katzen’s other book for preschoolers, Salad People) is a book of recipes designed to be “read” and made by little ones (with help from their grown-ups). The recipes, which include selections appropriate for any meal of the day, are nutritious, straightforward, and toddler-proof: nothing will collapse or taste awful if your little one stirs too long or not long enough. The ingredients are vegetarian and include a nice array of fruits and veggies. The main improvement I’d suggest is using whole grain flour, since the recipes assume white (start out with 1/2 whole wheat pastry and 1/2 white, if you’d like; you can also substitute spelt flour with good result).
The reason I love this book is that I am a working mother with a long commute, and I detest having to spend even 20-30 minutes of my evening making dinner while my tired husband tries to keep our son distracted. It seems a waste of family time. Pretend Soup turns cooking into a lovely chance to spend time with my little guy, and he snacks on the ingredients as we go which keeps him from starving and is really healthy. It isn’t haute cuisine, and since I love to cook really good food I’m a bit wistful, but the results are tasty enough to satisfy myself and my husband. I’m still working on smoothly incorporating this, and rounding it out with grown-up salads and other options, but I can’t say how glad I am for this strategy.
Also, I’ve noticed it is hard for working parents to find time to teach our kids basic life skills (like cooking). Pretend Soup & the follow-up Salad People are a good step in that direction!
Price: $17.95 Buy This Book