Ready, Steady, Spaghetti: Cooking for Kids and With Kids

Ready, Steady, Spaghetti: Cooking for Kids and With Kids

by Lucy Broadhurst
Andrews McMeel Publish­ing, 192 pp., $19.99 (paper)

I've noticed that foods kids like can be divided into three main categories. The first involves some combination of starch, tomatoes, and cheese. Think pastas, pizzas, and nachos. The second includes foods that come in nifty little packages. Dumplings, spring rolls, pies, and frittatas fall into this category. Then, of course, there are sweets, such as cakes, cookies, brownies, and candies. Ready, Steady, Spaghetti is a new cookbook for kids that taps into these three categories in a big way.

This colorful, brightly photographed volume is a perfect cookbook for a budding young chef and his or her parents. Here are child-friendly recipes for stir-fried rice, spaghetti carbonara, spaghetti with tomato sauce, spring rolls, spinach and ricotta cannelloni, oven-baked chicken, guacamole, even recipes for risotto and potato gnocchi.

Not surprisingly, nearly half of the recipes in this book are for sweet treats. Some are quite clever: star-shaped cookies that sandwich chocolate filling and Popsicle sticks to form miniature fairy wands; Jell-O cups decorated with paper parasols, crumbs, and candies to resemble miniature beach scenes; or chocolate-dipped bananas on a stick. Just about all the desserts, from the pecan tartlets to the tiny éclairs, are meant to be miniaturized.

The recipes are basic; most have only five to 10 ingredients and can be prepared within an hour. Simple, half-page to one-page instructions cater to child-sized attention spans, so that theoretically, kids can prepare these recipes themselves. In reality, don't be surprised if yours comes running in asking what "finely diced" means or wondering what a bamboo steamer is. Most kids will need some parental guidance. But this cookbook allows children and their parents to discover the joys of cooking perennial favorites with few tears and a whole lot of fun.