Product Description

This book is intended for all the family to use. It should encourage children to have a go at cooking with their parents. It provides tips and advice on how best to feed your children now, especially with the abundance of readily available junk food around, and how to start enjoying family meal times around the dining tables instead of in front of the television. The author covers the problems of the breakdown of the family unit at mealtimes, looks at supermarkets versus smaller specialist shops and underlines the pleasures that can be had from sitting down to a family meal together.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38451 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Independent on Sunday
‘Family Food is a sure candidate for recipe book of the year’

Daily Mirror
'An eye-opening approach to what little angels should eat'

Matthew Norman, Sunday Telegraph
‘This is a chef to be cherished’

Customer Reviews

Classical cookery?
Having eaten at his restaurant a question entered my mind is 3 michelin stars a high enough rating for heston possibly not! this book is an example of why and its just for home use.

A Kindred Spirit,
Although I do not have children I was drawn to the book by Blumenthal's awesome reputation. The book is very easy to follow he even points out where problems might occur and how to prevent them. Like me he too is dismayed by the way companies are marketing junk food at children and when I read his intro especially about a certain juice company I knew we were indeed kindred spirits. So if you hate juice that is actually just chemicals and teddy bear faced sandwich meat this is the book for you, he draws on his experience with his own children as to how to get children to open up to new tastes and flavours and I think the book is brilliant the recipes taste just as good for an adult!!!

Great Cooking, but is it really for kids?
Firstly, this is a great book - right up there with my all-time favourite cooking books. There are some inspirational recipes in there, and even the apparently more traditional ones are discussed in such thorough detail beforehand that you are forced to think through the whole process of preparation and cooking. It really does make you regard these recipes in a new light. Having just acquired a digital temperature probe, I'm especially keen to try the low-temperature cooking that Blumenthal champions.

The only quibble I have with the book is that for one that claims to be aimed at getting children involved in cooking, I could find very few practical techniques or methods or recipes for achieving this. There's a fair bit of theoretical discussion about the merits of getting children involved in cookery, which I fully endorse. There are also some interesting food tasting experiments, which kids could find fun (and so could adults!) Apart from that, though, the other references to children are almost exclusively about simply urging the reader to get their children involved, about how much Blumenthal's own children enjoy a particular recipe, or how they themselves enjoyed making it. Mr Blumenthal is lucky - I can't imagine my own children tackling those particular recipes (too daunting), and some more specifically children-oriented recipes would have been nice. Blumenthal does explicitly distance himself from "gimmicky...happy parent monthly magazine" style recipes in the foreword, but I can't help feeling that in trying to avoid that particular trap he's swung the pendulum too far the other way.

Nonetheless, for adults it's a great book. Don't hesitate to buy it.