No child hates to cook. This point, unfortunately, seems to have eluded the authors of the current crop of children's cookbooks.
Cooking is as natural to children as making mud pies or playing in the sand.
A child flipping through these books, however, would quickly conclude that cooking was unsafe, unpleasant and strictly for women. The books fall into a few easily identifiable categories. This international cookbook, illustrated by Susan Greenstein, was written by a food stylist, Diane Simone Vezza, who tried to turn an ordinary cookbook into one suitable for children by making the sentences short and cheery and rating the recipes for difficulty. Children, in this view, are as harried as their parents and equally in need of time-saving devices. And so the author substitutes canned and frozen ingredients wherever possible.