The first cookbooks of the year

Well, the holiday rush of cookbooks is past and the publishers are looking ahead to spring.  This week the mail held the galleys of spring–April cookbooks in their raw, pre-edited state.  I don’t test recipes from galleys or advance proofs–if there’s mistakes, they might be corrected in the final copy, and I don’t want to base my judgment on an unfinished recipe.  So the spring pile grows, tantalizing but immature.

Meanwhile, books from the current season are still trickling in.  I take a personal interest in healthy-eating books for kids, so I leafed through The Cleaner Plate Club: More than 100 Recipes for Real Food Your Kids Will Love with the usual blend of hopefulness and skepticism.   The verdict?  Pretty good.  These types of books come in two versions: marketed to kids (cartoon characters, food that looks like toys), and marketed to parents (charts, lists of tips).  Cleaner Plate Club is the latter, with seasonal produce lists and grownup recipes you just happen to serve your kids.  It’s for the parent who can’t motivate himself to eat healthy, but will pull it together for his kid.

Regardless, after gaining a pound every time I looked inside a cookie book this winter, it feels good to be reading about beans and spinach again.  I just hope my kids feel the same way.