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LOOK AND COOK BREAKFAST

Name: LOOK AND COOK BREAKFAST
Author: Valorie Fisher
ISBN: 9781662620683

A FIRST BOOK OF RECIPES IN PICTURES

From the Look and Cook series

by Valorie Fisher ; photographed by Valorie Fisher ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 5, 2024

Ambitious young cooks will eat this up.

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Picture-perfect breakfasts.

Novice chefs ready to prepare luscious breakfasts will appreciate this handsomely designed photographic cookbook featuring 20 nutritious morning repasts. The table of contents notes that the book uses symbols designating the number of servings that each recipes makes, the time needed to carry out a step or to prepare a dish, and, crucially, when a step requires adult supervision or intervention. A minimally worded, three-part introduction lists kitchen tools such as tablespoons and cutting boards, explains pre-cooking basics such as washing hands and gathering essentials beforehand, and offers instruction on using tools and measuring and preparing ingredients. The recipes follow; children will appreciate names such as “Bear Poop” (mixed berries with granola and yogurt), “Cinnamon Snail” (muffins with swirls of cinnamon), and “Choco Pillow” (a simplified pain au chocolat–esque creation). Recipes begin with captioned pictures of equipment and quantities of ingredients, followed by numbered, wordless, step-by-step instructions, generally including visuals of final products. The directions are mostly comprehensible, though cooks may have to refer to ingredient and tool lists. As needed, variations and substitute ingredients are provided; for some dishes, Fisher suggests recipes elsewhere in the book that will go well together. The captivating images consist of photos of dollhouse “miniature sets” with racially diverse doll-size human figures. Endpapers highlight labeled photos of scrumptious fruits.

Ambitious young cooks will eat this up. (Informational picture book. 5-9)

Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024

ISBN: 9781662620683

Page Count: 56

Publisher: Astra Young Readers

Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024

Categories:

CHILDREN'S HEALTH & DAILY LIVING

- BOOK REVIEW
NOW YOU KNOW WHAT YOU EAT
by Valorie Fisher ; illustrated by Valorie Fisher

- BOOK REVIEW
NOW YOU KNOW HOW IT WORKS
by Valorie Fisher ; illustrated by Valorie Fisher

- BOOK REVIEW
I CAN DO IT MYSELF
by Valorie Fisher ; illustrated by Valorie Fisher

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THE LITTLE BOOK OF JOY

by Dalai Lama & Desmond Tutu ; illustrated by Rafael López ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 27, 2022

Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40.

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From two Nobel Peace Prize winners, an invitation to look past sadness and loneliness to the joy that surrounds us.

Bobbing in the wake of 2016’s heavyweight Book of Joy (2016), this brief but buoyant address to young readers offers an earnest insight: “If you just focus on the thing that is making / you sad, then the sadness is all you see. / But if you look around, you will / see that joy is everywhere.” López expands the simply delivered proposal in fresh and lyrical ways—beginning with paired scenes of the authors as solitary children growing up in very different circumstances on (as they put it) “opposite sides of the world,” then meeting as young friends bonded by streams of rainbow bunting and going on to share their exuberantly hued joy with a group of dancers diverse in terms of age, race, culture, and locale while urging readers to do the same. Though on the whole this comes off as a bit bland (the banter and hilarity that characterized the authors’ recorded interchanges are absent here) and their advice just to look away from the sad things may seem facile in view of what too many children are inescapably faced with, still, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the world more qualified to deliver such a message than these two. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40. (Picture book. 6-8)

Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-593-48423-4

Page Count: 40

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022

Categories:

CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S HEALTH & DAILY LIVING

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DO NOT LICK THIS BOOK

by Idan Ben-Barak ; illustrated by Julian Frost with photographed by Linnea Rundgren ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 5, 2018

Science at its best: informative and gross.

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Why not? Because “IT’S FULL OF GERMS.”

Of course, Ben-Barak rightly notes, so is everything else—from your socks to the top of Mount Everest. Just to demonstrate, he invites readers to undertake an exploratory adventure (only partly imaginary): First touch a certain seemingly blank spot on the page to pick up a microbe named Min, then in turn touch teeth, shirt, and navel to pick up Rae, Dennis, and Jake. In the process, readers watch crews of other microbes digging cavities (“Hey kid, brush your teeth less”), spreading “lovely filth,” and chowing down on huge rafts of dead skin. For the illustrations, Frost places dialogue balloons and small googly-eyed cartoon blobs of diverse shape and color onto Rundgren’s photographs, taken using a scanning electron microscope, of the fantastically rugged surfaces of seemingly smooth paper, a tooth, textile fibers, and the jumbled crevasses in a belly button. The tour concludes with more formal introductions and profiles for Min and the others: E. coli, Streptococcus, Aspergillus niger, and Corynebacteria. “Where will you take Min tomorrow?” the author asks teasingly. Maybe the nearest bar of soap.

Science at its best: informative and gross. (Informational picture book. 6-9)