Review By STACY DONG (www.zainelicious.blogspot.com)



FEEDING KIDS
120 Foolproof Family Recipes - The Netmums Cookery Book
By Netmums and Judith Wills
Publisher: Headline

Netmums is the largest online parenting organisation in Britain with over 756,000 members, mostly mums. It is a portal where parents come together to share information, to make friends and to support each other in all parenting issues that you could think of.

This book is one of a series of five books produced by www.netmums.com. It is a compilation of recipes shared and contributed by netmum members.

This is definitely not your average recipe book. For starters, it has a whopping 120 family recipes! One would think for a recipe book to have that many recipes, it would have to be a big book. But no, it is an average-sized book, which makes it easy for any parent to bring along and refer to while cooking.

Understandably, with 120 recipes in an average-sized book, you don’t get your average recipe book with glossy photo pages that make you go, “ooh”. The whole book is almost completely packed with back-to-back recipes.

The recipes are organised into six chapters which cover simple dinners, outdoor eating, winter meals, lunch & picnic boxes, dessert & drinks and the sweets - bakes, biscuits and cakes. And since the recipes in this book are contributed by British mums and parents, you get recipes like bubble & squeak (a potato and vegetable side dish), kedgeree (smoked haddock dish), Welsh rarebit (cheese topping for bread) and savoury flapjacks.

The essence of cooking for kids is simple ingredients and simple cooking. Most of the time, parents simply do not have time to whip up a complicated meal when you have hungry children waiting to be fed. So, it is not surprising that the recipes in this book have simple ingredient lists and are easy to cook. In fact, most of the ingredients are your pantry basics like flour, olive oil, sesame oil, etc.

There are also tips and advice from real-life mums scattered throughout the book. You also get “variation” tips in most recipes, helping mums to adapt the recipes to what they have on hand and the easiest way to go about the recipes. For example, for pizzas, you will find “quick pizza cheats”, which suggest using pita bread instead of making your own dough, or just using tomato puree for the spread, instead of homemade tomato sauce. All these suggestions, advice and tips would definitely come in handy when you are pressed for time.

As with all recipe books, each recipe comes with serving size, child age suitability as well as nutrition guidelines. Netmums has a fun and interesting way of using traffic light symbols for checking the nutritional guidelines for salt, fat, saturated fat and sugar levels. There are also “Nutrition Notes” to explain the health benefits of each dish.

There is also a “nutritional crash course” at the beginning of the book. This chapter gives a clear description of the various nutrients that every child needs. It also gives good information on the food labelling and ingredients on the food label so that parents will be well informed when buying food and groceries off the shelves. There are also meal planning tips, with a downloadable planner chart from the netmums website.

My verdict? I do like the book. It may not be the fanciest recipe book but it is definitely a packed recipe book, which makes it good value for money.

The recipes seem easy enough to prepare and, most importantly, they look interesting and yummy enough for me to want to try them out. And I do like the fact that the recipes are not set in stone. With all the variation tips and suggestion, I could adapt the recipes to what my child likes. It also helps that these recipes are actually tried and tested by mums in netmums, so you know they would be worthwhile to try out.

Yes, this book is definitely going into my library of good cookbooks for kids.