By David Joachim and the editors of Men's Health; 43 sturdy cardboard pages. From the book cover: "With the recipes in this book, you can easily whip up 50 simple, healthy meals. This food does everything from prevent heart disease and prostate cancer to boost your immune system and energy levels."
It may not really be true that SpaghettiOs prevent cancer, but these recipes do for sure make yummy, high-kid-appeal meals that almost any child can help with. And hey, you can sponge the book off afterward!
- Turn kid favorites like SpaghettiOs and Fritos into something kinda healthful
- Recipes are both simple and tasty
- Kids can help by dumping the contents of cans, bags and boxes into bowls
- Most require no chopping or pre-preparation
- Nutritional information included for every recipe
- There's probably a limit on how healthful anything that comes from cans can really be
- Recipes aren't for the food-allergic (or salt-averse)
- Serving sizes are often smaller than they realistically should be
- Easy to miss the extra ingredients in small print
- You might want to skip the last chapter, entitled "Beer"
- Chapter 1: Ham
- Chapter 2: Chicken
- Chapter 3: Fish
- Chapter 4: Chili
- Chapter 5: Beans
- Chapter 6: SpaghettiOs
- Chapter 7: Veggies
- Chapter 8: Fruit
- Chapter 9: Beer
Special-needs families were probably the farthest things from the mind of the Men's Health editors who created this can-shaped cookbook, with its convenience-food recipes and no-nonsense instructions ("Dump the chili and cream cheese into a microwaveable bowl. Nuke on high for 1 minute.") But they've unwittingly created the perfect little volume for parents who want their kids to help cook. Each recipe fits on one page, features photos of key ingredients as well as the finished product, and is truly, honestly simple to make. Not Rachael Ray simple, with mountains of things to mince and saute and fillet, but "Open a can and dump it into a bowl" simple.
Better still, it's the perfect cookbook for parents who want their kids to eat. Many of the recipes mix kid-friendly ingredients like SpaghettiOs, Fritos, refrigerator biscuits and baked beans with more healthful ingredients like vegetables and lean meats to create a compromise you and your child can live with. They've been popular in our family, anyway. Our favorites include "Mushroom Meatloaf" (with canned 'shrooms and Manwich sauce), "Cowboy Stew" (turkey chili, baked beans and ground beef), and "Tuna Roma" (canned tuna and jarred pasta sauce).
You're probably not going to want to feed your kids canned goods every night. But this is a gem to add to your collection -- for kid-help nights, for dad-cooks nights, for nights when all you've got in the house is a few cans and some chips. It's good stuff.
