Amazon.Com Customer Review; Format: Paperback; Book:  Teens A League Of Their Own; by Christine Burton

5 Star Review by Kat K (Amazon Customer) on January 12, 2016

As a future registered dietitian, I was very excited when I heard about this book. After having it for a while, I’m still really excited! One of the big challenges to successful relationships between adults and food is a lack of opportunity or experience in the home kitchen at a younger age. This book is designed to encourage and inspire teens to become involved with preparing food at home.

So what makes this book “good for teens”? The recipes are NOT dumbed down. There is a wide variety of items… you could prepare an entire elaborate dinner event from appetizer through soup/salad, bread, entrée, and desserts. It is written to be easy and efficient to read. The ingredients list includes helpful preparation details, which naturally leads to a “mise en place” method of cooking… having everything ready in the form in which the recipe calls for it before getting into the body of the recipe. This method sets a novice baker/cooker up for success, which will encourage future attempts at cooking.

This was developed with the help of four high school students, and you’ll see photos of them throughout the book. All of these recipes have been tested, and prepared by teens before being published. I love that this isn’t just a book that an adult wrote while imagining how teens would think, feel, or act. It’s road-tested, if you will.

Another feature of this book that I think makes it unique and wonderful is the emphasis on personalizing each recipe. There are, of course, some ingredients that need to be what they are (particularly in baking!) but the author suggests many alternate ingredients that may better suit an individual’s preference and she encourages you to play with the recipes she gives you and adapt them in ways that you find delicious, fun, and exciting.

Nearly every recipe includes a color photo of the finished product, and where helpful, photos of the process as well. Teens have grown up in a world of immediate attention, and the inclusion of so many photos allows a quick perusal of this book to grab their attention quickly and draw them in to find items they would like to prepare themselves. When reading the recipes paired with the photos, they are clearly written, with what I suspect is deliberate avoidance of technical cooking terms. The style of the recipes encourages you to believe that even if you’ve never cooked your own dinner from scratch… you can do this. And that, in my opinion, makes this book a wonderful resource for anyone who is, lives with, or works with, a teenager!

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