Library Thursdays: Easy Cook Book

Easy Cook Book: you simply look and cook Vols 1- 4 Department of Food Science, RMIT. Melbourne, Vic ; Villamanta Publishing, 1986-1998.

It's that holiday time of year when many of us want (or feel the need) to be cooking and baking special dishes. Independent Living Skills Resources has developed a series of cookbooks (available in our library) that are visual and simple to follow so that people with Down syndrome, or anyone that absorbs information better visually, can make wonderful meals and specialities. There are other cookbooks with pictures that are easy to follow but they are mainly aimed at children. This set of cookbooks would appeal to all ages and includes microwave recipes, vegetarian dishes, soups, salads and desserts. There are 4 volumes and each volume is spiral bound and has wipe-clean pages. The measuring cups and spoons shown are colour coded for easier use. Our recommendation for this holiday season is the microwave Plum Pudding from Easy Cook Book 3. Go to http://www.easycookbook.org/cookbooks.htm to see which recipes are in each volume (click on the volume number on the left). To borrow any of these cookbooks, email us at the library.

Joan Medlen (author of the Down Syndrome Nutrition Handbook--available from the library)provides a service to create visual recipes from standard ones so if there is a family favourite that you'd like to makeover, have a look at Joan's site. You can download a sample of a recipe and the visual makeover. Her visual cookbook, Cooking by Color is soon to be released.