Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I've read most every baby food/nutrition book on the market. This book is by far the prettiest: it has beautiful color illustrations that make you feel as if feeding your baby will be an exciting and colorful journey. However, once the romance of the first feeding is gone (and after you've scrubbed dried brown banana off your child's tray for the thousandth time), I fear that this book will get lost in the dusty recesses of your kitchen bookshelf, as my copy has.
My main criticism is that the book doesn't deliver what the cover promises: "Fast, healthy, and fun foods." The book should be subtitled "Fun foods to make if you are in culinary school and have a whole lot of free time on your hands." Check out these suggestions: vegetable croquettes, apple, mango & apricot muesli, paella, chocolate profiteroles & puff pastry mice. Even the purees are exotic and complicated: dried apricots with semolina, spinach, potato, parsnip & leek, tasty ground meat with rutabaga & tomato. Now if someone wants to really knock themselves out for a special occasion, I think that these menu suggestions could be very inspirational. But, the average parent just needs someone to tell them that they can steam carrots in the microwave with a little water then mash them with a fork.
I really lost hope when I noticed that they devote an entire page to "making purees with a mouli." Where would I even begin to find a mouli, and if I did, where the heck would I find room to store it? Have these folks never heard of a food processor or blender? Why make life so complicated? I've got to imagine that the authors of this book live a very priveledged life or that they've never had small children clinging to their legs!
I also think that the time estimates for the recipes are inaccurate. Many of the recipes involve quite elaborate decoration suggestions, yet the prep time is listed as only 20 or 30 minutes. Again, the pictures are lovely, and I really do wish my food could be so inventive. But the pictures remind me of the Christmas cookie covers of magazines that showcase all those elaborately decorated cookies that I could never hope to reproduce. Hey, we are not talking high art here, a good day for me is when there is more food in the baby than there is on the floor.
Another complaint I have with this book is that it covers too much ground without much depth. This book begins at birth and goes to five years, and it's only 145 pages. With so much space taken up with glossy pictures and exotic recipes, there is not much room to cover any one topic effectively.
All in all, I think this book might be a good supplement cookbook to have. You might pull it out some day when the sun is shining and you are feeling especially ambitious. But, on the average day, I can think of five other cookbooks I'd pull out before it.
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