LOVE AT FIRST BITE

Cooper's quick-treat cookbook starts with breakfast and standard egg cooking--frying, boiling, scrambling, etc.; the remaining 150 or so recipes are all snacks, and ""no-bake"" snacks at that. (She never explains her aversion to the oven, even for cakes and cookies, though she does considerable stovetop cooking. And the heavy demands she makes on the blender assume an especially hardy model.) There's an essential sameness to Cooper's many concoctions; whether they're called cereals, blender drinks, vegetable dips, sweet or crunchy snacks, or sandwich spreads, many are just different combinations of yogurt, wheat germ, oats, seeds, nuts (especially peanuts), fresh and dried fruits, fruit juices, and, less often, honey and chocolate or carob. All of this conforms admirably to the current conventional wisdom and Cooper, laudably, goes lighter on sweets than Jill Pinkwater did in The Natural Snack Cookbook (both of course shun white sugar)--though Pinkwater will retain the Crunchy Carrot title for genuine variety, sheer deliciousness, and real cooking. In comparison Cooper's is a repertoire of junk health food--but certainly preferable to the commercial snacks and sodas that still appear to be after-school staples.