Skip to main content

New Middle Grade Books About Food

By

When I was younger I loved to bake and I had a favorite cookie recipe I made over and over again. I felt so grown up when I would bake something all by myself.  Recently, I have read some delicious books about kids who enjoy cooking as much as I do. They feature a main character who either loves cooking or loves food and experimenting in the kitchen. These morsels of entertainment might just inspire you to whip something up today.


The Last Super Chef
By Chris Negron
HarperCollins Publishers, 2021. Fiction.

Curtis Pitch has always wanted to become a chef like the famous Lucas Taylor, the host of his favorite TV show, Super Chef. So when he learns that Super Chef is going to have a kids only season, Curtis knows this is his chance to show just what he can do in the kitchen. He wins a spot in the competition and heads off to New York to film the show. But Curtis also has a secret, he wants to be acknowledged by his father, the famous chef, as well as help his mother and sister. 



Chef Yasmina and the Potato Panic
By Wauter Mannaert
First Second, 2021. Graphic Novel.

Yasmina lives in an apartment in the city where money is tight but they eat like kings. Yasmina likes to use her favorite cookbook and fresh vegetables from the community garden to make yummy meals for her family. But the garden is demolished and replaced by some special scientifically enhanced potatoes that end up being addictive. Now, Yasmina must find a way to cure all the people who have been affected by the potatoes and she must do it quickly.


All You Knead is Love
By Tanya Guerrero
Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers, 2021. Fiction.

Alba has been sent across the ocean to live with her grandmother in Barcelona. As she and her grandmother start spending time together baking, Alba discovers she enjoys baking bread. The more time she spends with her grandmother, the more she begins to learn about her mother and her life when she was younger. She slowly begins to accept her new life, makes friends, and learns to bake bread for the local bakery. But everything comes to a stop when an unexpected visitor comes to Barcelona and Alba finds out her favorite bakery could be closed.


Measuring Up
Written by Lily LaMotte
Illustrated by Ann Xu
HarperAlley, 2020. Graphic Novel

Cici has just moved to Seattle from Taiwan. She is settling in and making friends but she misses her grandmother. When Cici learns about a cooking contest that has a grand prize that is enough to pay for a ticket to fly her grandmother to Seattle, she decides to enter. Cici knows how to cook Taiwanese food and she loves cooking so she is sure she can find a winning recipe. But when her competition partner dismisses Cici's recipes, she decides she must learn to make new recipes that she has never made before. With some help, Cici begins to channel her inner Julia Child, but will this be enough to help her win the contest? 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall

By
A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall By Jasmine Warga New York: Harper, 2024. Fiction. 211 pages. A painting has been stolen from the Penelope L. Brooks Museum and sixth-grader Rami Ahmed is worried he's the main suspect. His mother works at the museum as the lead custodian and Rami spends a lot of time hanging out at the museum while she works. On the day the painting went missing, the only people there were the security guard Ed, the cleaning crew, and Rami. Then, a mysterious girl appears in the museum. She floats around from room to room and only Rami can see her -- and she looks exactly like the girl from the missing painting. To prove his innocence and help figure out who the floating girl is, Rami partners up with an aspiring sleuth at school named Veda and the two dive into unexpected situations as they try to solve the mystery. This is a cozy mystery that is focused mostly on characters and ambiance and only a little on the mystery itself. Don't read this book if yo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: The Factory

By
The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages.  Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: The Amazing Generation

By
The Amazing Generation: Your Guide to Fun and Freedom in a Screen-Filled World Written by Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price  Illustrated by Cynthia Yuan Cheng New York: Rocky Pond Books, 2025. Informational. 226 pages.  In a kid-friendly adaptation of his best-selling book, The Anxious Generation , Jonathan Haidt teams up with Catherine Price, author of How to Break Up With Your Phone , to bring the power of good information directly to the hands of those that this issue affects most directly — kids on the cusp of getting their own smartphones. The book presents information about the drawbacks of having a smartphone and social media too soon in clear and easy-to-understand language, with eye-catching graphics and pop-outs. Throughout the book, quotes from real teens and young adults, called screen "rebels" by the authors, emphasize the points the authors are trying to make. Fictional characters are featured throughout in a graphic novel story, which further emphasizes the po...
Post a Comment
Read more