Hands-on kids will find much to appreciate in this compendium of fun and food with an Earth-friendly focus.
A month-by-month guide to seasonal cooking, green craft projects and enjoyable challenges that has something to offer even the most environmentally conscious kids.
Recipes include everything from novice-friendly Ants on a Log to more challenging undertakings such as New England Pot Roast. Even reluctant cooks will not be able to refuse Ghoulish Guacamole, Witches’ Toenail Trail Mix, or Tilly’s Gingersnaps. Tips for creating distinctive sandwiches as well as customizing pasta salad for different tastes increase the range of each recipe. Monthly activities include everything from gardening and composting to crafting recycled greeting cards and throwing green holiday parties. Kids looking for even more fun with their food will appreciate monthly challenges like holding a cooking contest. Sidebars feature profiles of chefs and environmentalists as well as additional fun facts. Engaging photographs and brightly colored layouts will entice even reluctant readers. Resources for further research as well as separate indices for the activities and the recipes are included. Calling this a cookbook is a bit limiting; this resource is intended to engage young chefs both inside and outside of the kitchen, connecting the world of food with the larger world around them.
Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4263-1717-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: National Geographic Kids
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
Chicken sexer? Breath odor evaluator? Cryptozoologist? Island caretaker? The choices dazzle! (Informational picture book....
From funeral clown to cheese sculptor, a tally of atypical trades.
This free-wheeling survey, framed as a visit to “The Great Hall of Jobs,” is designed to shake readers loose from simplistic notions of the world of work. Labarre opens with a generic sculpture gallery of, as she puts it, “The Classics”—doctor, dancer, farmer, athlete, chef, and the like—but quickly moves on, arranging busy cartoon figures by the dozen in kaleidoscopic arrays, with pithy captions describing each occupation. As changes of pace she also tucks in occasional challenges to match select workers (Las Vegas wedding minister, “ethical” hacker, motion-capture actor) with their distinctive tools or outfits. The actual chances of becoming, say, the queen’s warden of the swans or a professional mattress jumper, not to mention the nitty-gritty of physical or academic qualifications, income levels, and career paths, are left largely unspecified…but along with noting that new jobs are being invented all the time (as, in the illustration, museum workers wheel in a “vlogger” statue), the author closes with the perennial insight that it’s essential to love what you do and the millennial one that there’s nothing wrong with repeatedly switching horses midstream. The many adult figures and the gaggle of children (one in a wheelchair) visiting the “Hall” are diverse of feature, sex, and skin color.
Chicken sexer? Breath odor evaluator? Cryptozoologist? Island caretaker? The choices dazzle! (Informational picture book. 7-9)Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5362-1219-8
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Nosy Crow
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Starting with a lonely slice of pizza pictured on the cover and the first page, Thornhill launches into a wide-ranging study of the history and culture of food—where it comes from, how to eat it and what our food industries are doing to the planet. It’s a lot to hang on that slice of pizza, but there are plenty of interesting tidbits here, from Clarence Birdseye’s experiments with frozen food to how mad cow disease causes the brain to turn spongy to industrial food production and global warming. Unfortunately, the volume is designed like a bad high-school yearbook. Most pages are laid out in text boxes, each containing a paragraph on a discrete topic, but with little in the way of an organizing theme to tie together the content of the page or spread. Too many colors, too much jumbled-together information and total reliance on snippets of information make this a book for young readers more interested in browsing than reading. Kids at the upper edge of the book's range would be better served by Richie Chevat's adaptation of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (2009). (Nonfiction. 8-12)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-897349-96-0
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Maple Tree Press
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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