Cooking for Coco

If a cobbler's children are traditionally the worst shod, does it follow that the offspring of a chef are raised on a diet of junk food? Not in the case of my own two daughters, Alicia, five, and 13-month-old Liberty; they have always eaten what their parents eat, and that's real food made from fresh ingredients, both at home and in restaurants across the country. Luckily, the girls both enjoy their food and are always willing to try anything new.

Surely it's just common sense? After all, we all want to give our children the best possible start in life, and as SiÆ'n Blunos says in the introduction to this book, food obviously plays a big part in that. But children can be faddy, and there are plenty of places in our industry that serve up mass-produced food.

And while, as chefs, whipping up a fruit or vegetable pur‚e for our newly weaned tots might be second nature, it doesn't seem to be a habit followed by the general public. Alarm is growing in Britain about the rapidly rising levels of obesity in children, with the subsequent health risks including diabetes and heart problems, but it seems we have become a nation for whom cooking is pretty much a spectator sport. We feed our children on dinosaur-shaped chicken pieces and ourselves on microwaved convenience food while watching the latest celebrity chef create a gastronomic feast on the TV.

Even parents who think they are doing the right thing, feeding their babies on commercially prepared organic baby food, seem to flounder when the child starts needing "real" food.

And that's where Cooking for Coco comes in. It's a friendly, useful book with lots of fantastic, easy recipes suitable for the whole family from babies to adults, which have all been tried and tested by the Blunos children.

From fruit and vegetable pur‚es through to salmon and parsley fish cakes and deep-fried rice pudding balls, there are meals here to delight any child without condemning mum or dad to hours in the kitchen.

Most of the ingredients will be familiar to your average shopper, with lots of fruit and vegetables, meat and fish, and there are tips for freezing and reheating the meals, along with basic stock recipes to avoid the need for the high-salt-content commercial stock cubes.

All the recipes are very simply explained, and the book is attractively laid out. There aren't many pictures of food, but there are lots of photographs of Coco. Still, she is a very cute tot, and this is a book aimed at doting parents.

Cooking for Coco would make a perfect gift for the parent of any new baby; you might well be giving the child a love of healthy eating and nurturing a passion for cooking which will long outlast the cute romper suit or cuddly toy you might otherwise have chosen. A read of it might also give some mass caterers a few pointers to what they should be aiming for.

Marcus Ashenford, chef-proprietor, 5 North Street, Winchcombe, Gloucestershire

Cooking for Coco
SiÁ¢n Blunos
Carroll & Brown
£12
ISBN 1-903258-70-7