Book Review: Wild Eats & Adorable Treats | Animal Inspired Meals & Snacks for Kids

I'm sure you've seen the gorgeous bento lunches & adorable snacks on Pinterest, where moms spend what must be ages making their kids' food into all sorts of fanciful creatures. I bet you, like me, have looked at those & scoffed, "Ain't NOBODY got time for that!"

But. In the few instances where I have spent a few seconds extra making banana slices into mice, or toast into bear faces, the kids really loved it. Maybe it's because my kids are generally served exactly what we're eating; they don't usually get any special meals. In any case, it is fun when you've got a bit of time on the weekend for a fun breakfast or you want to suprise them in their lunch box at school, to make their food cute. Inviting your kids into the kitchen to make the food critters can be even more fun, since they're more likely to actually eat something they've had a hand in making.



Jill Mills, creator of Kitchen Fun with My 3 Sons, has recently published a cook book of sorts that is a great source of ideas for making food into all kinds of cute critters. Wild Eats & Adorable Treats is full of simple ideas to help you & your kids make 40 animal-inspired meals & snacks. The book covers breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, & desserts with recipes like Whole Wheat Walrus Waffles to Crabwiches to Foxy Fruit Snack.

The recipes in Wild Eats & Adorable Treats are fairly simple, calling for common ingredients that you probably already have in your pantry & fridge. Many recipes use partly premade ingredients like packaged crescent roll dough & hot dogs, so they are very easy to make, with the downside that you can't control the amount of sugar, salt, or white flour that way. The foods feature fresh fruit heavily, though not all of the recipes are health food.

One thing that makes this book stand out is the Animal Facts after each recipe. Jill features a short blurb with information about the biology, habitat, behaviour, etc of the animals in the recipes. It's great to have the extension from cute critter-shaped food to learning about the real thing. I think it'd make a good gift for a kid who likes cooking or a kid that you're trying to get to eat more.

Wild Eats & Adorable Treats is published by Skyhorse Publishing & retails for about $20 CAD.


Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book to review, but was not otherwise compensated for writing this post. The opinions above are my own, as always! 

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