YA Book Giveaway: The Green Teen Cookbook

 

read my review here

 

Calling all foodies!

 

I have ONE free copy  of The Green Teen Cookbook up for grabs! For your chance to win, post a comment to the blog and please include your first name, city, state and email contact (sorry USA addresses only). Deadline for all posts is Friday, August 22. The winner is chosen randomly by Randomizer and will be notified by email on August 14. Please check your email on that date. Winner has 24 hours to respond. The book will ship from New York. Good luck and start posting!

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Kirkus Reviews:

"This by-teens, for-teens cookbook focuses on specific ways teens can live a healthy, environmentally conscious life without sacrificing the food they love. . . Cleanly laid out with photos of the teen contributors and the dishes themselves, this introduction to green eating is informative without being preachy."  - Kirkus Reviews
From the publisher:

BOOK DESCRIPTION The Green Teen Cookbook: 

The Kitchen can be one of the trickiest places for young adults to navigate—add trying to be healthy, eco-minded, and budget-conscious, and things get even more complicated! Now there is The Green Teen Cookbook (Zest Books; ISBN 978-1-936976-58-4; $14.99 PB) to help guide teens through the mysteries of the kitchen and create some amazing meals. With inspiring tips on how to cut through the chaos of going green as well as master over 70 recipes, including a seasonal key that ensures optimal freshness (and a minimal carbon footprint), any teen can become a green culinary expert and learn how to: shop on a budget; get the most out of your pantry; cook more consciously; eat healthier, and more! Featuring full color photos throughout, The Green Teen Cookbook is an all-in-one guide for eating green and eating well—by teens and for teens! 

This book is for people who enjoy cooking great, seasonal food for themselves as well as for other people—on a budget. It’s a guide for customizing recipes for each season, and for learning how to appreciate the different foods available each month. And readers looking to educate themselves on the food industry will enjoy the essays about globalization, vegetarianism, imports/exports, farming in the US and abroad, and much more.

 

The Green Teen Cookbook: Recipes for All Seasons - Written by Teens, for Teens edited by Laurane Marchive and Pam McElroy

Published by Zest Books and distributed by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

ISBN-13: 978-1-936976-58-4; July 29, 2014; $14.99 PB, 144 pages; Ages 12+

Green Teen Pick: The Green Teen Cookbook

The Green Teen Cookbook: Recipes for all Seasons--Written by Teens, For Teens
edited by Lauran Marchive & Pam McElroy
Zest Books
2014
9781936976584
144 pages


The Green Teen Cookbook is a  unique fresh approach to eating and cooking green for teens--and big news! It's written by actual teens for their teen counterparts. When the editors asked teens for recipes that used fresh ingredients, they received thousands of submissions from around the world. They were surprised by  the excitement that teens had for food, cooking and eating green and seasonally. This little green book will excite the new chef in the teen kitchen and awaken the sleeping chef in all the rest of us.

Many cooks and eaters do not eat green or healthy. We grab and go. We overspend on produce that is not seasonal. We end up wasting food and throwing away our hard earned money. The Green Teen Cookbook shows cooks how to plan and prepare tasty food following a few easy rules.

Eating seasonally allows eaters and cooks to eat healthy, more flavorful foods at a premium price. Tomatoes in season are delicious at every meal--slice them on a sandwich, puree them for a sauce or make a nice salsa using the fresh bounty.  Zucchini and asparagus are also seasonal gifts.  Once these foods are gone for the season, look forward to eating them again next year.  According to chef Andy Gold, "Tests show that leafy greens like spinach lose around half of their nutrients in the first twenty=four hours after they're harvested." No wonder the spinach in the market is not as flavorful as that you pick up at a farmer's stand. It's been packaged and shipped, sometimes over thousands of miles! Eating local produce and products is a big boon to practicing being green. Teens support local growers and cut out the cost of transportation and the burning of fuels to transport those  goods.

Recipes run the gamut of tastes from making your own peanut butter and Chocolate Hazelnut spread (compare to Nutella) to homemade energy bars to seasonal frittatas to Sausage Bolognese to hummus to guacamole. Colorful photos accompany every page; as every cookbook junkie knows, a cookbook just isn't a good cookbook unless it comes with color photos on every page! The recipes included are easy to follow, include quick tips, and are user friendly for beginner chefs.

I say, let's roll up our sleeves, wash our hands, and start cooking! This is one great gift for that foodie tween or teen in  your life!

From the back cover: "The Green Teen Cookbook is more than just another set of recipes: it's an all-in-one guide for going green and eating well."

Highly, highly recommended for every teen wannabe chef and foodie. Grade 5-up with some supervision  for younger chefs.

This review has been posted in compliance with the FTC requirements set forth in the Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising (available at ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005revisedendorsementguides.pdf)

FTC Required Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher. I did not receive monetary compensation for this review.

Quirky Girl Pick: Ten Miles Past Normal

Ten Miles Past Normal
by Frances O'Roark Dowell
Atheneum (Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division)
2011
211 pages

Fresh, offbeat, and funny, Ten Miles Past Normal will have readers and librarians enthralled. This book may be picked by savvy state library associations as the best of 2011.

Janie Gorman doesn't want to be known as the Goat Girl, but it's hard to shake that name when she sometimes smells of goat poop and other rich farm smells. Living on a small goat farm with her pseudo-hippy parents and "getting back to nature" blogger mother, and making natural goat cheese sounded like fun when Janie was nine; now that she's in high school, being awakened at dawn by an industrious rooster and feeding goats before school is not as much fun as she had once thought it would be.

Janie has yet to find her high school niche; she longs for a place to fit in. When she is offered bass guitar lessons by a boy named Monster, she gives it a try. The funny thing is, Janie was born to play the bass! Now, she's one of the "cool" Jam Band kids.

The Goat Girl is now the Jam Band bass girl. Ten Miles Past Normal is a fun read and a real page turner. It's nice to see that normal girls living normal lives can be an interesting read for teens--girls don't have to have super-powers or paranormal boyfriends to be entertaining.

Highly, highly recommended grades 7-up.
No language, no sex.

FTC Required Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher. I did not receive monetary compensation for this review.

Destroy All Cars

Destroy All Cars
by Blake Nelson
Scholastic, 2009
218 pages

Move over, Holden Caulfield. There's a new misanthrope in town, and his name is James Hoff, the teen protagonist in Nelson's latest YA novel. James is a dark soul who is fed up with consumerism, mindlessness, abuse of the planet by humans, and humans, in general. He thinks most Americans feel that "mental accuracy is a bad thing," and writes rants in his journal that his English teacher compares to "manifesto stylings." He thinks the answer to saving the planet is to destroy all cars. James is a thoughtful character who has difficulty fitting in with his peers--peers who are typical flat characters interested in high school gossip, clothes, who just broke up, who is back together, who is hooking up, who is in trouble, and other vapid conversations. Also troubling James is his parents' complete lack of passion for anything that matters to him. They keep pushing him to pick a college, and he keeps avoiding the topic. He has no plans for post-high school. He is just trying to make it through his junior year.

The only person James connects with is a high school activist, Sadie Kinnell, who tries to save the planet by starting in her neighborhood with a petition to save a pond from greedy developers. James and Sadie have a love-hate relationship, and do end up having sex, but they both are sorry afterwards. James feels regret and is wistful to be the "old" him before the encounter. Readers will feel empathy for James, a typical teen who is confused, lost, and searching for answers to easy questions like: where do I want to go to college? and hard questions like: why do people have to have kids?

Grades 8-high school. Some language, sex, though not graphic. Recommended for high school collections.