Books

Here are books I strongly recommend!

Please note that I don't take advertising money or affiliate fees from anyone and I never will; that's not what I'm about.  I provide these links for you because I believe in them.

Jamie's Ministry of Food: Anyone Can Learn To Cook In 24 Hours
I find this to be the best practical advice for beginners. If you do nothing else than look at the pictures in the book and videos on the web, you can replicate the meals even if you have never cooked before. Be on the lookout for Jamie's new TV series about cooking for children in the United States.

The Sneaky Chef To The Rescue
This is the second "Sneaky Chef" book.  If you consider your child a picky eater, the first step I would advise you is to go get this book on the Sneaky Chef website and learn how to incorporate vegetable purees into everything. This particular volume also helps with breakfast, allergies, and making store-bought mixes healthier by adding ingredients.

Simple Food For Busy Families
This book is the best summary I have found on basic nutrition (what and how much), the symptoms of imbalance in nutrition (wrapper food versus real food) and a great list of ingredients with pictures and descriptions. The authors introduce the flexible "mix and match" technique which is the best method I have found so far for translating the "meal pictures" in your head into ingredients, and thus providing the best practical assistance for the plan-shop-prepare cycle.

Ending the Food Fight
This is a book written by the Optimal Weight for Life program of the Childrens' Hospital of Boston, which runs a nine-week program to help obese children. This program addresses lifestyle issues strongly related to the weight and health of the child in addition to the healthy eating steps. Dr. Ludwig includes a lot of cases, where you can see real-life situations and what works.

Feeding Your Child For Lifelong Health
This book I found has a very concise list of strategies for feeding in between birth and six years of age, with a very useful FAQ section in every chapter, which helps greatly to translate the principles into everyday sections. It also has a chapter on food solutions to common problems such as sickness, sleep, weight, and allergy problems.

Petit Appetit: Eat, Drink, and Be Merry
I found in this book the best birthday cake recipe for first birthday. Snacks and celebration foods are the most suspect to have the potentially harmful ingredients you want to reduce in your child's diet. How about reproducing the "lunchables" at home for reducing ingredients from 60 to 13, avoiding trans fats, reducing sodium by 270 grams and sugar by 16 grams, in addition to adding fiber and protein? Has a brilliant section on traveling snacks too. This is the third book in the series, the first is a cookbook and the second is a baby cookbook.

Baking with Agave Nectar
Black bean brownie, zucchini chocolate cake - I've done these over and over again, they are wonderful. Recipes in the book include not-so-common ingredients (such as sprouted spelt flour), but the results are incredibly good - light, not heavy, no sugar rush afterwards. I found the techniques fairly easy to execute.

Hungry Monkey
A very funny book! A record of feeding a child in her first three years of life. Written by a father, who is a food writer and a gourmet chef. Hilarious perspective.



Cooking for Babies and Toddlers
By a British author, so a lot of the recipes have a British flavor. It introduced me to a wonderful technique: how to cook once and serve food to a baby, a toddler, and a husband all from the same food by varying texture and spices. Brilliant approach! A lot of technical pictures included.

Kids
I picked this cookbook up in the small food store at IKEA. I like it for two reasons: it heavily features fresh ingredients and it does that in a beautifully-photographed way, so you can get a good sense of the texture of the food. Some of these pictures will take over in your mind how you picture food! IKEA's food store has a good quality salmon, cheese, and shrimp supply at very reasonable prices.

Food 2.0: Secrets From The Chef Who Fed Google
This book has a fairly sophisticated set of recipes and a very appealing approach to pairing tastes. I like the soy pancakes in particular. This is not a childrens' cookbook but the fresh ingredients and combinations gave me a lot of ideas for adapting new ingredients and meals in our family's diet.

Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea
Pictorial and text about the history and operation of this program by Alice Waters. Makes you want to dream. If you look at this and then your child's cafeteria, you'll be motivated.


The Fussy Eaters Recipe Book
This book is also by a British author so some recipes have a British bent but it explains a great deal about cooking for picky eaters. It has a great approach to fussy eating and the chapters are organized by what they do not like to eat. It also includes a chapter on gluten-free cooking (best brownies!).

Secrets of Feeding A Healthy Family
This book is the best I ever found on how to raise good eaters. "Eating is a complex brew of preference, habit, attitude, intuition, knowledge, and physical necessity. All must be considered, and critical to them is enjoyment." This book gave me the best guidelines in "competent eating" and the best description of how my own attitudes influence how good and competent eaters my children will turn out to be.

Everyday Food
Occasionally has a really good set of menus, from seasonal recipes, with tips about using leftovers and doing it on a low budget, providing a few skills for pulling it off, and providing a shopping list.


Jamie's Dinners
This is the book I go back to when I am preparing a dinner from what I have in the pantry. My foolproof dinner fall-back-on.



Nourish
This is your Canyon Ranch guide to clean and healthy food. I look at it for inspiration. This book also has a great breakfast section for those weekend days when you have the time. It also has an extensive section on soups, in my opinion a highly underutilized meal, and a great way to eat more vegetables and eat more healthy.