Cheerios Cookbook: Tasty Treats and Clever Crafts for Kids
Author: Betty Crocker Editors
The o's have it!
There are all sorts of clever ways for kids to enjoy Cheerios! This colorful book is packed with recipes for 25 tasty treats plus 10 cool craft activities the whole family will love.
For more great ideas visit cheerios.com
Beverley Fahey - Children's Literature
Cheerios, that staple of the toddler and preschool diet, is the central ingredient in this cookbook aimed at Moms and their kids. Sturdy board covers and a spiral binding will help this book stand up to rugged use. There are recipes that call for crushing Cheerios to use in muffins and parfaits, pressing them in variations on the Rice Krispies treats, and rolling them into a variety of cookies and treats on a stick. There are recipes that include a number of Trail Mix variations. Various recipes can be shaped into stars, teddy bears, pumpkins, and Christmas trees. All are easy to make and, while some look a little more appetizing then others, children will want to try them all. A clear color photo accompanies every recipe. The crafts included are a little less creative—such as Cheerio studded cardboard sunglasses—but the edible necklace and crayon holder are useful and fun. Safety tips, a list of utensils required, a nutrition guide, and a checklist for rating the recipes precedes the crafts and cookery. All in all a handy little cookbook for kids. 2005, Wiley Publishing, Ages 5 up.
Table of Contents:
Nurturing through Nutrition.Recipe for Safety.
Cooking Checklist.
Whatchamacallits & Thingamajigs.
My Recipe Diary.
Chapter 1: Crush 'em.
Chapter 2: Press 'em.
Chapter 3: Roll 'em.
Chapter 4: Mix 'em.
Chapter 5: Shape 'em.
Index.
See also: Breast Cancer Survival Manual or Beating Lyme
Hundred Dollar Holiday: The Case for a More Joyful Christmas
Author: Bill McKibben
Too many people have come to dread the approach of the holidays, a season that should — and can — be the most relaxed, intimate, joyful, and spiritual time of the year. In this book, Bill McKibben offers some suggestions on how to rethink Christmastime, so that our current obsession with present-buying becomes less important than the dozens of other possible traditions and celebrations.
Working through their local churches, McKibben and his colleagues found that people were hungry for a more joyful Christmas season. For many, trying to limit the amount of money they spent at Christmas to about a hundred dollars per family, was a real spur to their creativity — and a real anchor against the relentless onslaught of commercials and catalogs that try to say Christmas is only Christmas if it comes from a store.
McKibben shows how the store-bought Christmas developed and how out of tune it is with our current lives, when we're really eager for family fellowship for community involvement, for contact with the natural world, and also for the blessed silence and peace that the season should offer. McKibben shows us how to return to a simpler and more enjoyable holiday.
Christmas is too wonderful a celebration to give up on, too precious a time simply to repeat the same empty gestures from year to year. This book will serve as a road map to a Christmas far more joyful than the ones you've known in the past.
Norah Vincent
To give Bill McKibben his due, let's admit the obvious. Christmas is too commercial. Depressingly so, in fact. A good number of us don't go to church on Christmas Day, and an even greater number of us are too lazy, too cheap or too estranged from our family members to buy, much less make, thoughtful presents for them. A lot of us just throw checks at each other to assuage our consciences. We're hopelessly hard-hearted, really, and McKibben is right to point it out, even though we, as a culture, know this too well already. But before we go giving McKibben too much credit, let's look a little closer at his self-trumpeting example.
If you know anything about McKibben's publisher, that paradigmatic corporate behemoth Simon & Schuster, you know that Hundred Dollar Holiday is the kind of leaflet -- at 96 pages, it can't rightly be called a book -- that their sales force positively cooed over. It's money for nothing, fluff in a brown paper bag. It's worldly wisdom whittled down to the size and scope of a Zagat's for Wilmington, Del. It's a cash grab Christmas "book" that, irony of all ironies, subtlety of all subtleties, tells you not to spend so much money on Christmas. Is this marketing cynicism at its worst and cleverest, or is this boardroom cupidity rising to new heights?
If McKibben really means what he says in Hundred Dollar Holiday -- that the real grinches of our culture are not well-meaning, cushy ascetics like him, but "those relentless commercial forces who have spent more than a century trying to convince us that Christmas does come from a store" -- then what is he doing publishing at Simon & Schuster, which, in the publishing world, at least, is surely one of the best examples of commercial force around? What's more, Simon & Schuster stays afloat largely by how much it sells at Christmas time. It subsists on the profits it makes on insipid Christmas gift books that nobody needs, books like Hundred Dollar Holiday. Yet McKibben remains willfully blind to this whopping contradiction. So much so that he even makes a euphemistic sales pitch for his non-book in the very pages of the thing itself: "So you may want to loan people your copy of this book as a way of trying to enlist them in your plans for a merrier Christmas."
Later, in a more direct attempt to justify himself, McKibben tries to preemptively answer his critics -- notable among them has become Margaret Talbot, who took him to task in the New Republic a few months ago for his shallow moralizing. Talbot reminded us that by advising consumers not to spend so much on Christmas, McKibben is tinkering with economic realities he either doesn't understand or fails to address. It sounds good to preach about the warm and fuzzy meaning of Christmas, but, as Talbot argues, spending less in December would leave a great many people out in the cold: "I would like to know ... what McKibben has to say about the jobs that would be lost -- starting with minimum wage retail positions -- if all of the privileged Americans at whom his exhortations are directed quit throwing their money around at Christmas." McKibben's response? "Change in Christmas traditions will come slowly enough that most retailers will be able to adapt." Is this McKibben the armchair economist speaking, or McKibben the happy-go-lucky social reformer? It's hard to know which is worse. The fact is, shops would founder if they lost their December income, and the economy would likewise falter, creating greater hardship for everyone, especially the poorest of the poor.
In Hundred Dollar Holiday, McKibben is selling us a ruse of rectitude, not the real thing. Consider his ultimate justification for not spending money at Christmas: "Perhaps you're simply squirreling [your unspent Christmas money] away in the bank -- which is precisely what economists are always telling us we need to do in order to boost productivity and reverse our lagging savings rate." Ah, so perhaps that $100 isn't being saved for a holier Christmas Day at the homeless shelter (as McKibben suggested it might be earlier in the book), but for a happier rainy day back at the family ranch. Maybe McKibben's book should have been called "Putting the 'No' Back in Noel: How to Stiff Your Relatives at Christmas and Convince Them You're a Better Person for it." Do yourself and the economy a big favor this Christmas. Take a leaf from McKibben's jeremiad, and don't buy his book. -- Salon
Walter Kirn
Yes, Christmas is too consumerist. And yes, the world might be better off if people had only one child. But did we really need Bill McKibben to tell us?. . . McKibben makes a book where a bumper sticker would do. . .[his] insistence that we not only agree with him, not only mimic him, but admire him, too, would test the patience of a saint. -- New York Magazine
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