Cooking with four hands and that two of these are from a child is one of the most fun, entertaining and motivating exercises that can be practiced with children. In our newsroom, cookbooks always have a very special place because they not only entertain us; also because they are like small laboratory manuals with which to experiment with smells, flavors or textures. But there are also multiple proposals that do not only go through the kitchen. In this new installment of Tales that Tell, we bring you recipes, yes, and the good ones, but also stories about cooks and other knowledge books that will leave your mouth open. Many proposals so that this summer you can turn your kitchen into a small laboratory.
Authors of other titles such as Our House, A Walk by the River, the Excursion or In the Circus, once again explore the formula of the great illustration that tells things while inviting children to find things. This time we are going to the market!, first to the countryside, where we collect all the food we need: fruits, vegetables, honey, sheep… Then we process some foods such as milk, and make cheeses or even ice creams. The countryside settings are varied, from the most orderly to the most chaotic, with laying hens and impeccable greenhouses. Then we enter the supermarket, one of the places where we can find everything that we have previously collected and processed. But we also go to a small market in an agricultural town, and, later, to another market with more substance but no less charm. And what is there to discover? Well, the rough harvest, Maya’s robot doing nonsense or chaos at a supermarket stop. You have to look very well.
The Japanese artist Mayumo Oono once again creates a universe for the little ones, this time a tailor-made restaurant. As he has already done with a pastry shop, a garden and a fashion workshop, Oono now recreates in My Little Restaurant all the spaces of a restaurant and what can be found in it, from utensils, fruits, ingredients and various products, even ways of cooking and preparing dishes. With customers and menus, which today are based on xiaolongbao (China), pho bo soup (Vietnam), Scotch eggs (United Kingdom), tacos (Mexico), Meatballs (Sweden), paella (Spain) and other niceties that allow us to give Around the world through cooking. With fold-out pages and lots of stickers to customize our own restaurant. Also in Catalan.
Tiburcio, Escuala, Tigre and Tora is a family of sharks that is the protagonist of this recipe book that Xabier Gutiérrez gives us to have fun in the kitchen with our children. The head of the Arzak restaurant laboratory comes from a fun family that lives next door to SpongeBob and is crazy about good food and the best food. Not only does he draw it for us so that the little ones have a place to entertain themselves while the dishes are prepared, he also tells us part of their story, such as the fact that they are great activists in the campaign against the use of shark fins in the kitchen. . It would be more.
For Tiburcio, the chef shark, all kinds of recipes appear, combining some more appetizing such as chocolate biscuits or four cheese pizza, with other less striking ones such as broccoli with parsley mayonnaise. Vegetable lasagna, peaches with whipped cream, migas with grapes or tomato with herb omelette are other of the succulent proposals with which Gutiérrez has made us salivate. Bon appétit, mes enfants!
Mr. Amadeo has invited Mrs. Blanca to have a snack and to be up to the task, he has decided to make a cake. But he has no idea how to do it. Luckily, Mr. Amadeo has many friends with great advice to give him and the result of this great collaboration will be, to say the least, surprising. A good cumulative story that the collage technique gives depth and realism. And it is that in the kitchen, anything can happen. Also in Catalan and Basque.
Two Spanish creators break into this publishing house specialized in translating the best of children’s literature from the Nordic countries and they do so with a story based on a bowl of lentils. What if The Lentil Queen doesn’t like lentils? Well, imagination and matryoshka come into play. There are three of them and they come hungry, but also with gifts for the queen, whose huge dish of lentils before her is enough to feed an entire kingdom. Her dad told her to eat them all. Wish fulfilled.
In Calle Babel, nº10 it smells wonderful. It just so happens that all your neighbors are excellent cooks. Mrs. Pilar mashes tomatoes to make a salmorejo, while María mashes avocados to make guacamole. The good thing about this street is also how diverse it is to cook. You can smell Mrs. Flores’s bean stew as well as Mr. Lamar’s sole meunière. But without a doubt one of our favorite recipes is the Dahl with coconut milk that Mr. Tafgore cooks with his daughter, which is almost as good as Jeremiah’s cookies. And with such delicious smells we have thought that the best thing to do is to come and live on this street (also in Catalan under the title Dinar al carrer de la Magrana, 10).
What a great time Mar Benegas and Ana G. Latitegui have in these Kitchen Monsters, a book-game where each movement is a new discovery. “Is there a monster in the kitchen?” Ask the creators by way of introduction. “Investigate carefully/ camouflaged in the flour/ how many there are. Did you see the first one?” And this is how when turning the page, all the rest of the pages are cut into four parts so that the young reader can combine them to taste. For example, on the legs we can put bread on the calves, sea bass and snails, chicken feet, vacuum cleaners, tangerine peels, celery, stalactites… And that only on the legs. For the rest of the body there are also dozens of options and each of them has its own rhyme. Over 200,000 rhyming kitchen monsters. A whole inventory of imagination. Also in Catalan.
Combel also publishes Sebastià Serra’s Where do we eat today?, a pop-up for the little ones (3-4 years old) that takes us to a pizzeria, a Japanese, a Mexican, a kebab and a burger. And after so much binge on pizza, farfalle, sushi, gyozas, beans, enchiladas, couscous and hot dogs, we’ll stay at home where we can also cook anything, whenever we feel like it. Also in Catalan.
This is the culinary adventure of Rabbit and Elephant, two unique and attractively drawn characters with a curious and fun relationship that leads them to search the jungle for the necessary ingredients to make a Truffle Stew. But are there truffles in the jungle? This is what our protagonists are going to try to find out, whose weakness for the wonders of their surroundings is evident with every step they take. They are undoubtedly two naturalistic and tenacious characters, but open to changing course if the script requires it. Ideal for early readers who already need to have a challenge on their hands. Also in Catalan.
Let’s go by parts. Do you know what animalicide is? Well, it is essential to understand the approach of this book with an amazing ending that questions everything we eat. The protagonist of Vegetarian? He is Román Mojapán, a name that already indicates the boy’s taste for food. One day, two roosters in suspiciously executive attire knock on his door and lead him to an industrial warehouse where he is subjected to an unusual trial in which all the meat he has eaten throughout his short life is brought up. . And apparently, it has not been little and it has been very varied. Will this be a reason to decide to become a vegetarian? And what do vegetables have to say about it? Interesting approach in line with the disturbing illustrations and the actual debates. Also in Catalan.
From the series Los superpreguntones, which has touched on topics such as prehistory, the human body or the universe, now comes What do we eat?, a kind of dictionary of portable curiosities to consult at any time. With a very attractive format, halfway between a school notebook and a personal diary, but with a hard cover and laminated pages, the authors answer 140 questions, some as crazy as “is it possible to eat upside down?” Brief, understandable answers that leave you with the right point of knowing more. For example, what is the biggest fruit? Why do super fruits shine so bright? Or how were potato chips invented? The book is divided into three parts to be able to cover all the points that have to do with food: From the field to the table, do we eat everything? And do the digestion. When we finish, we will be experts, at least in various curiosities.
The successful Netflix series starring a frozen waffle and a Japanese mochi has given rise to this delicious book where Michelle Obama, one of the guest artists of the series, is the prologue here. The book covers the adventures around the world of Gofre and Mochi in their search for the ingredients they have needed throughout the series, which has led them to very different settings, but also to meet famous chefs such as Samin Nosrat, José Andres or Bricia Lopez. Tomatoes, salt, potatoes, pickles, rice, eggs or mushrooms are some of the ingredients that these cute characters have had to look for, which has given rise to several delicious recipes in Waffle and Mochi Let’s cook!, which you can try do with the little ones in the house, while talking about textures, flavors and taste buds or, the thousand ways to cook an egg. By the way, there is also a recipe to turn our beloved popcorn into spicy. You have to be quite daring to embark on this entertaining culinary journey.
“All the cultures of humanity have had some organized system to sell and buy. The market has been the center of many cities since antiquity. And it has served for citizens to find what they needed to live and have, at the same time, a space for meeting and exchanging ideas and knowledge”. Thus begins another interesting trip to the most famous markets in the world, with a prologue by Ferran Adrià, who recognizes himself as at home in this type of space, and who tells us about his experience in the Ver-o-Peso market in Belém, in the Amazon.
A great illustration of the Boqueria market welcomes this trip to the great markets of history, which is also through the food that can be found, some as exotic as the fried spiders in the Skuon market or the lizards in Kumasi, Ghana. This is how we also discover where the corn that is sold in the central market of San Pedro comes from, in Cuzco (Peru) or how globalization allows the Ejido peppers to be sold in the Borough Market in London.
Undoubtedly, Mercados is a very interesting proposal that comes to us from the hand of a publisher that has also produced interesting books for the little ones such as Salad or Pasta by Teresa Bellón (illustrations) and Paula E. Font, so that future chefs (from 1 year old) can be cut, grated, boiled, strained and sautéed safely. And by the way learn the process. Also in Catalan.
The union that occurs in this book between the concept of naturalism and cooking is really interesting, since it focuses on the nature that we bring to the table every day and that we propose to contemplate with the curious eyes of a scientist, after the transformation carried out by the chefs. For example, we take a lemon. We cut with a chef’s knife, and we observe before squeezing it or using it in a dish, how the food is shown from the inside: its nerves, its symmetries, its seeds… We look for tubers and edible hours in our fridge; also all kinds of seeds in our pantry. We would never have thought that there was so much edible nature in our house, right? But can you make a cookbook without anything to eat? Obviously, Naturalists in the Kitchen is no exception, but its recipes, or rather, culinary experiments, are well hidden and are only suitable for curious minds.
Childhood, profession, family, research and cooking. These are the main elements that are concentrated in Les delicioses aventures dels germans Roca, where Joan, Josep and Jordi go through their childhood memories together with recipes directly taken from their kitchen, as well as some more scientific aspects that have a lot to do with cooking. After the prologue, where the Roca brothers put on paper what this book has meant to them, we literally enter the Celler de Can Roca facilities, an interesting detailed plan of where each detail is carried out. There is also talk of Can Roca, the place where it all began and which continues to be part of history.
Between bolognese cannelloni, cucumber and yogurt salad, lentil burgers and magical flans, endearing stories emerge, such as Josep’s days fishing with his uncle Josep in the river, or the day they discovered that there were specific knives to cut the fish. In the more scientific aspects, they have also made an effort to present topics that can function independently from the rest: why do some foods darken when they are cooked, the weeping when cutting onions or the origin of cocoa are some of the topics that are dealt with in this work. that brings the little ones closer to three big ones from our kitchen (in Catalan).
The cook from San Sebastian Aizpea Oihaneder, who runs the Xarma Cook together with Xabier Díez
“Every time you eat a cookie, there’s a whole bunch of adventure hidden in it, without which our snacks would be boring as hell. We wouldn’t have chocolate chips, because cocoa wouldn’t have crossed the ocean from its native America. We wouldn’t have vanilla to give it that taste so rich…”. With these words, the writer, researcher and “story eater” Aina S. Erice prefaces the Adventures and misadventures of food that changed the world, a book that won the first Ibero-American prize for the best informative book for children. The award is not trivial and values ??a clarifying approach to how certain foods crossed the Atlantic (and other continents). In both ways.
First, he exposes the foods that were brought to America, such as wheat, olives, rice, vines, sugar cane or bananas. All with their stories and reflections, small maps of origin and current places of cultivation. The second part of the book is dedicated to foods brought from America, such as corn, peppers, potatoes, cocoa, tomatoes or the aforementioned vanilla. An excellent book of knowledge written in an attractive way and highlighting the curiosities to catch the attention of the little reader. A must have for any kitchen.
The cook Ada Parellada, a great lover of cooking with children, lends her original recipes to put together these Recipes to the Rescue whose main objective is to consume seasonal and local products as the first step to be more respectful of our planet. Every gesture counts, and that is why the book calls into question consuming products out of season due to the costs they generate for the environment. In addition to succulent specific recipes for each season-tomato and cheese calzone, potato balls with tuna and egg, coca de calçot, spinach fritters…- for each season, the Montenegra, the name behind which the creator Marina is found. Montenegro, look for the most important fairs that take place in Catalan territory such as the vineyard snail fair in Òdena (September), the pumpkin fair in Sant Joan de les Abadeses (October) or the medicinal herbs market in Montseny (June). . Also in Catalan.
We include this Dulcey Salado by the Barcelonan pastry chef Victoria Gudiol not only for the presentation of the book, where the illustrations and drawings match perfectly with the photographs, but also for the recipes: this is a book full of proposals that we are more than convinced will In addition to enthusing children, they will want to be the ones who rule the roost in the kitchen. And the thing is that the book starts with a whole repertoire of Christmas pastries and cakes, to later continue with salty cakes and other delicacies that are easy to tackle with the help of little chefs. Also in Catalan.
