Top ten cookery books for kids

Cookery books for children offer a brilliant way to find recipes that will be easy to make and keep kids engaged in the kitchen. Kids' cookbooks are roughly divided into two sections: books aimed at adults and those aimed at children. The adult books tend to cover topics like encouraging children to eat different foods and providing a balanced diet. The recipes in the books for children may not always be as nutritionally aware (it's easy to encourage children into the kitchen if there's chocolate involved!) but should be bright, colourful and interesting to a wide age range. 

I've hunted around a found a great selection of books in both categories:

1. My Daddy Cooks by our very own Nick Coffer. Nick cooks with his toddler Archie and the recipes are interesting and use a brilliant variety of ingredients. 
2. Hungry? The Innocent recipe book for filling your family with good stuff is written in Innocent's quirky style and has a huge amount of information
3. Cooks and Kids by Alan Rustad is newly published in conjunction with the National Fostering Agency.  In this lovely book, top chefs help children bring their dream dishes to reality.  There are some great ideas in here and it's for a good cause too. 
4. Feeding Kids: the Netmums cookery book features recipes from members of the Netmums.com forum and therefore guaranteed to be tried and trusted. Some great tips for parents of fussy eaters here too.
5. Good Food: 101 Recipes for Kids by Angela Nilsen. This book contains recipes from the BBC Good Food Magazine and gives excellent nutritional information. It's more for adults than children, though.
6. Annabel Karmel’s Top 100 Pasta Dishes - Easy Everyday Recipes that children will love is another one for mums. If you've got a child who will only eat pasta, rush out and buy this right now.
7. The Food Our Children Eat: how to get children to like good food, by Joanna Blythman is an intelligent book for parents exploring the draw of junk food, providing simple suggestions for encouraging our children to embrace healthier eating. Some great recipes and lots of realism too.
8. What Shall We Cook Today? by Ryland Peters and Small is a great book to turn to on a rainy afternoon. Bright pictures make choosing a recipe easy and the wording is simple enough for children to follow themselves.
9. Vegetarian Food for Kids by Laura Washburn is a fabulous resource for those parents worrying about feeding a healthy vegetarian diet. This book is so inspiring it's worth buying even if you eat meat.
10. How to Cook by Dorling Kindersley. Colourful and interesting, this book is fabulous for the slightly older child and encourages independence in the kitchen. Starting with the basics, and including loads of great tips on hygiene and safety, it moves on to really quite complex dishes. Ideal for the confident young cook.

Next year, look out for Bill Granger’s ‘Bill cooks for kids’, out May 12th, which promises more of Bill's fresh, healthy asian fusion cooking.