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Middle Grade Non-Fiction
Bake, Make, and Learn to Cook Vegetarian: Healthy and Green Recipes for Young Cooks

Bake, Make, and Learn to Cook Vegetarian: Healthy and Green Recipes for Young Cooks

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Bake, Make, and Learn to Cook Vegetarian: Healthy and Green Recipes for Young Cooks

Author(s)

David Atherton

Co-Authors / Illustrators

Alice Bowsher

Genre(s)

Age Range

Release Date

November 08, 2022

ISBN

978-1536228434

Buy This Book

The 2019 winner of The Great British Baking Show goes green with a collection of must-try vegetarian recipes, following up his debut book Bake, Make, and Learn to Cook.

Grab an apron! With more than forty vegetarian and plant-based recipes for scrumptious meals, savory snacks, tasty treats, and showstopper desserts, David Atherton’s second course is a feast for readers who care about the food on their plate. Will it be spicy cauliflower bites or mini pizza swirls for your snack on the go? Pasta and homemade pesto or made-from-scratch veggie burgers tonight? How about melt-in-your-mouth chocolate cookies with a secret avocado ingredient (shhh)? Featuring easy-to-follow, boldly illustrated, step-by-step instructions, with notes on stocking a pantry, commonly used cookware, and eating locally and seasonally, this buffet of deliciously healthy recipes is perfect for budding chefs everywhere.

Editor review

1 review

It's Corn and Potato Cakes for Dinner!

November 04, 2022 (Updated: October 03, 2023)

Overall rating

4.3

Writing Style

5.0

Illustrations/Photos (if applicable)

4.0

Learning Value

4.0

It's not important to know who celebrity cook Atherton is to enjoy this vegetarian tome for beginner cooks. Like the earlier Bake, Make and Learn to Cook (2021) (which had fantastic illustrations by Rachel Stubbs), this offers a variety of meals and snacks from a "green" perspective. It would be helpful to the planet if people ate less meat, and these recipes provide an easy and delicious way for children to convince their families to do just that.

I always like to see cookbooks with more practical meals than baking, and this starts out with some standards, along with a few unusual dishes. Tomato sauce, veggie burgers, and stir fry noodles are standards, but Eye Love Bread (bread with a sunny side up style egg baked on top of it) and corn and potato cakes will be new to most readers, and I may try the green spinach crepes myself, spread with homemade hummus.

There are also savory snacks, including a guacamole made with green peans, cheesy rabbit crackers with chia seeds, and bread crowns that reminded me of some of the elaborate projects in Harry Potter: The Official Harry Potter Baking Book by Joanna Farrow. Baked goods, such as a strawberry jam tart, sticky flapjack, and apple rock cakes, seem delightfully British, but the inclusion of "freezy grapes" seems a bit forced. I am sceptical that they taste like sorbet! For the truly motivated, there are "Showstoppers" including spring butterfly cupcakes. This has very good instructions for waht I learned a few years ago are "fairy cakes"-- you basically lop off the peak top of a cupcake, cut it in half, and stick it on top of the frosting so it looks like butterfly wings. Sort of. Finding out that this is what a fairy cake was one of the big disillusions of my adult life.

Good Points

All in all, the recipes are clear and easy to follow. The beginning of the book has standard safety precautions and information about tools and ingredients. Bowsher's illustrations are fun; different from Stubbs and as particulary 2020ish as those, but in a different color scheme and with heavier, inked lines. For children who loved Washburn's 20 Recipes Kids Should Know, Gerasole's The Spattulata Cookbook, or Gold's Kids Cook 1-2-3, this would make a great gift, along with some oven mitts and a package of chia seeds!