Cookbook Review: Organic Baby & Toddler Cookbook

 Organic Baby & Toddler Cook Book: Easy Recipes for Natural Foods by Lizzie Vann

Overview: This book presents 80 recipes for babies just beginning solids up to preschoolers, emphasizing natural and organic food choices and easy recipes that anyone could master.

The Good:
-Well layed-out
- Attractive book with beautiful photography
- Inspiring introduction on the importance of organic and healthful food and the benefits of making baby food at home
- Includes produce seasonality chart


The Not-So-Good:
 - Claims that contradict current APA guidelines (and pretty much any other guidelines) on virtually every page, such as starting solids at 4 months, offering tomatoes and corn from 4-6 months, etc, etc, etc
- While some of the recipes were tasty, out of the 5 I tried: 1 failed completely, 3 needed some work in order to be successful (i.e. amounts for liquid way off, cooking time much too short, etc), and 1 was very good as written
- Most of the recipes are sized for one serving. This is good if you are just trying it out to see if your child likes it but results in some pretty intense math when you try to convert the recipes to larger sizes for batch cooking

The Verdict: Not Recommended/Recommend with reservations

While there are some good ideas for flavour combinations and while the recipes are nice and easy and some are definitely decent, it seems as though many of the recipes were insufficiently tested and the nutritional and food introduction information is simply awful. I would be frightened is this was someone's only baby cookbook and if they were following the guidelines layed out within. This book is really only appropriate for older babies and toddlers if you already have a solid basis of information and are just looking for some new recipes and ideas, and in that case, borrow a copy from the library instead of buying this book.


* Do you have any cookbook recommendations? I'm always on the lookout for great inspiration!