Rating: WORTHY!
This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
Divided into four main sections: Vegetables, Fruits, Grains, and Protein-Rich Foods, with an addition section on Spices and Seasonings, I found this to be a great book for ensuring young children have access to healthy and tasty recipes. The book is lavishly illustrated with full color photographs of enticing food. The only thing missing was it not being printed on edible paper - but then the recipe would be gone, so perhaps thats not a bad thing!
The author is a dietician and it shows in how she writes. Each section listed above is divided into a smaller section on a particular fruit or veggie or whatever. She fearlessly lists foods a lot of kids would never dream of eating, because they've never been shown how dreamy such a food can be when introduced early and presented right. Each page not only has information about the nutritional value of the food and the best way to prepare it, but also hints, tips and suggestions on how to overcome that veggie shyness. My only disappointment here was that rutabagas (Swedes) were excluded, but they're so yummy that probably kids snarf them down without any issue, right?
Fruits are an easy sell - usually - but that doesn't mean there's nothing new to learn or even yummier ways to look at them (blueberry banana "ice cream" I'm looking at you!). Protein-rich foods included beef, but since it's alphabetical, it began with beans and is followed shortly afterwards by chickpeas. As a vegetarian I was thrilled by this!
The only overall issue I had was that this ebook advance review copy was clearly conceived as a print book, so the ebook pages were actually double-pages. I had to turn my iPad to landscape to see the whole thing, which meant it was rather small for reading, and it's definitely not something you can do a quick reference to on a smart phone - not without eyestrain or a lot of fiddling to enlarge the image. I'd have much preferred it if each page had been a single page which would have permitted portrait reading and a larger image, but overall I really liked this book and I commend it as a worthy read.
