Feeding the Whole Family & Tender at the Bone

Feeding the Whole Family: Recipes for Babies, Young Children and Their Parents, by Cynthia Lair

For a busy mom who is adamant about balanced, healthy meals, this cookbook is a godsend. The recipes, based on whole foods — one-ingredient foods like millet or black beans — are easy to make and ideal for picky eaters. Cynthia Lair’s fundamentals of cooking from scratch are practical from how to prepare dried beans and grains to substitutions for dairy and gluten and the value of sea vegetables. Each meal is nutritiously complete, capable of being free of allergies and intolerances and above all, super tasty. Lair, an accomplished certified nutritionist and professor at Bastyr University, has created a totally approachable, whole foods interpretive guide both for the masses and for health conscious foodies.

My favorite aspect of this cookbook is the first few chapters that demystify the complexities of food trends, the processing and labeling of food and the scientific research about fats, sweeteners and proteins. Cynthia’s creative tips on involving children in the kitchen, menu planning and packed-lunch ideas help develop a palette for real food, shared meals and an awareness of where food originates.

I appreciated the variety of whole grain breakfast options, including Sunny Millet with Peaches, Maple Butter Nut Granola, and Ancient Grain Raisin Cereal. Though I have made just about every soup in this book, my favorites are Thick Potato, Cauliflower and Dulse Soup and Bok Choy and Buckwheat Noodles in Seasoned Broth. My first successful attempt at baking bread resulted from using leftover brown rice to make one of the variations of Whole Grain Bread. My daily greens concoctions are grateful for the simplicity of Sesame Greens and Becky’s Braised Greens. I always keep Almond Ginger Drizzle on hand — it enlivens a wide array of dishes. The ongoing issue of what to give the kiddos to drink is solved: Bubbly Fruit Tea or Cranberry Ginger Cider. Anyone who wishes to raise healthy eaters will revel in this book. —Jamie Truppi

Tender at the Bone, by Ruth Reichl

What’s the secret recipe for becoming a culinary expert? Renowned food critic and former editor of Gourmet Magazine Ruth Reichl began creating her own recipes at a very early age, collecting unique ingredients from her childhood, adolescence and beyond. She retells her fascinating life story in the 1998 memoir Tender at the Bone — Growing up at the Table. From her three grandmothers (“none of them could cook”) to a mother whose cooking always promised the possibility of food poisoning, to foreign friends who exposed Reichl to the richness of cultures and flavors from around the world, the real-life cast of characters in Reichl’s life makes this read, at times, like fiction.

At the end of each chapter, Reichl includes a recipe that had been discovered or discussed or dissected in the preceding pages. Some of the recipes are simple (Marion’s Deviled Eggs), some are sweet (Artpark Brownies), some are sophisticated (Milton’s Pâté) and one simply sounds awful (her mother’s Corned Beef Ham).

Reichl is spicy, funny and candid. She acknowledges the absurdity in some parts of life and appreciates the great fortune bestowed in others. She discovered early on that “food could be a way of making sense of the world…If you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were.”  Tender at the Bone is one of several non-fiction books penned by Reichl over the past 42 years. This spring she published her first novel,  Delicious! And . . . I bet it is.  —Alyson Oüten

Feeding the Whole Family: Recipes for Babies, Young Children and Their Parents
Tender at the Bone — Growing up at the Table

Cynthia Lair | @dottiesourdough
Bastyr University | @bastyruniversity
Ruth Reichl | @ruthreichl