Average cookbook for kids

When my mum gave me this for Christmas I was slightly puzzled. At age 18 and living away from home and therefore cooking for myself I already know how to cook and generally don’t need a detailed step-by-step walkthrough on how to make scrambled eggs. (And I always wonder, why is it from the Australian Women’s Weekly?)

As a childrens cookbook its not a bad start, though with my bias I still prefer my old copy of My First Cookbook (though it is aimed at a younger audience than this one). It is sad to see the use of the microwave become more prevalent over time though, and with recipes advising children to use the microwave this seems like a laugh in the face of older cooking methods (I’d rather melt chocolate over a pan of boiling water any day). Microwaved scrambled eggs just seems wrong to me.

Looking at it from an older point of view I also noted the clichéd blonde freckled kids used in the example pictures, staring out with glee over their scrambled eggs and egg and bacon muffins. Slightly creepy, but maybe that’s just me.

The recipes themselves are pretty standard enough, a couple of them being more or less copouts, even for a kid’s cookbook. Toasties filled with spaghetti from a can and sliced cheese really doesn’t require a recipe, and pre-packaged pizza bases are an outright cheat for something so easy. The layout is easy enough to follow and the language clear with pictures to illustrate. Also, for healthy minded parents this book does include quite a few vegetable and fruit-based recipes, featuring the avocado with strange frequency. Plus there is the ever-useful conversions chart in the back of the book.

Eh, it’s alright, with a nice few ideas, mainly in the dinner section (but expecting a child to make a roast on their own is expecting a bit much by my standards), but its not really my kind of thing. Average at best.

5/10