With these two books, Kids Can launches a new jumbo information book series that’s right on target. Rather than presenting cooking as a social experience designed for rainy days, the cookbook takes a more comprehensive approach. Sections at the beginning provide safety tips, an excellent selection of cooking terms, and labelled pictures of more than 40 useful kitchen utensils. Cooks far older than the target audience may benefit from the culinary review in the book’s introduction.

More than 150 recipes, featuring everything from soup to sushi to sugar cookies, are clearly presented. A legend of symbols indicates the preparation time, number of servings, and level of difficulty for each recipe. The legend icons, utensil list, and whimsical illustrations of the food are tinted in various shades of yellow. While the colour works well enough for egg and cheese dishes, and is acceptable for cakes and noodle dishes, it’s particularly jarring for spinach salad and blueberry muffins.

Thoroughly researched and extremely practical, this cookbook will provide ideas and support for young people who have daily responsibilities in the family kitchen and are tired of dumping the contents of a can or a box into a pan and calling it a meal. This cookbook could also serve as a helpful resource in cooking classrooms.
The gardening book has its heart in the environmentally right place: young gardeners are urged to pull up their weeds by hand and improve their soil with compost, rather than using chemicals. Major sections of the book present ideas about gardening with native plants, creating wildlife gardens, and gardening at school and in the community. As well, lots of child-friendly suggestions are included, such as a pole teepee for beans, a fairy garden, and a shoe full of flowers.

The page format is varied, with diagrams and checklists as well as illustrations, and there’s an index. Most of the suggestions are practical and well explained, though a few, such as the perfunctory advice to thin your seedlings, could use more explanation, and the section on making a garden map needs to acknowledge seasonal differences in noting sun and shade at various times of day. Hand tools such as a trowel and a notched weeder might be mentioned alongside the hoe and spade, for smaller kids especially.

Such quibbles aside, this book is highly recommended both for its abundance of attractively presented material and ideas and its contemporary ecological awareness. Appreciating native plants, imitating nature in the arrangement of plants, avoiding invasive plants and non-organic gardening methods, creating a habitat attractive to birds and butterflies – the appealing suggestions in this book are well aimed at the interests and abilities of children.