Scholastic Review and Giveaway: Kids Cooking and More Pies!!

Giveaway open to Canadians.

I've made it clear before that I'm not much of a cook. I don't enjoy it, I like meals that are easy to prepare and clean up, and preferably containing only grains, dairy products, and select meats. I realize that I do not want to pass these issues on to my daughters, so "Kids Cooking: A Very Slightly Messy Manual" was a perfect choice to get me motivated. First published in 1987, this one has sold over a million copies, and has recently been rereleased with a fresh new cover.

This book is fantastic for parents and kids (about kindergarten age and up). It has a durable spiral binding (and can lay flat), with wipe-off pages. The recipes are step-by-step with lots of illustrations, and it even comes with a set of colourful plastic measuring spoons. Before you get to the recipes, there are helpful "Kitchen Rules" to share with the little ones.

And as for the dishes themselves, they are easy to prepare, with kid-friendly ingredients. The book is broken into sections:
Breakfasts (e.g. buried treasure muffins, eggs in a frame)
Lunches and Snacks (e.g. peanut butter popcorn, tuna cones)
Dinners and Salads (e.g. a better burrito, home-baked fish sticks)
Desserts (e.g. disgustingly rich brownies, frozen bananoids)
Not To Eat (e.g. play doh, finger paints)

Now if I attempted to make every recipe before posting this review...it never would have happened. But I did jump right in and make the one that sounded best to me...any guesses?

Yes, this morning my daughters and I whipped up the "Disgustingly Rich Brownies"...and man, are they good. Five year old Frannie was able to help me assemble ingredients by looking at the illustrations, and Maggie enjoyed pouring and "stirring". (She couldn't quite understand why we couldn't start baking when there was more white flour visible in the mixture than anything else!)

My girls are young yet, but there are many recipes that older kids could tackle alone. Now that the girls have a "taste" (no pun intended) of spending time in the kitchen with Mommy, I know that I'll be taking a lot more requests, which will be a good thing. Maggie already spent a full five minutes giving Daddy the baking breakdown, from who stood on which stool right through to the licking of the spoons.

Now while we're on the subject of eating...
"More Pies" is a hilarious picture book by well-loved author Robert Munsch, a title that surprisingly we did not already have on our bookshelf at home. The book is about a young boy named Samuel, whose mother refuses to cook him seven fried chickens for breakfast, leading him to hop a bus and enter a pie-eating contest!

Frannie's favourite part was when Samuel, full from the ridiculous amount of breakfast he was given, goes outside and rolls around screaming "I'm starving!!!" It was a great opportunity to work on "making connections" (teacher-speak) to the fact that my own daughters often complain of hunger even when they have been very recently well-fed!

Almost three year old Maggie asserted that her favourite part was "the pies"...which was basically the whole book. It's classic Munsch silliness at its finest.

Of course Scholastic is giving away a copy of both books (retail value almost $30) for one lucky Canadian This Mom Loves reader.

To enter, simply leave a comment below letting me know what your child's favourite food is. (Remember to leave your email address if it's not on your profile. If I can't contact you, you can't win!) For additional entries, once the mandatory entry has been completed, leave separate comments letting me know that:

• You follow This Mom Loves publicly through Google Friend Connect
• You subscribe to This Mom Loves by email (see sidebar to sign up)
• You follow @thismomloves on Twitter, and tweet about this giveaway (once total)
• You follow @scholasticCDA on Twitter, and tweet about this giveaway (once total)

The contest will run until Saturday, April 16th at 11:59 p.m. Eastern, after which time a winner will be chosen by random number generation. Good luck, and get cooking!!