Book Review: The Best Homemade Kids’ Snacks on the Planet

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The fabulous Laura Fuentes, founder of MOMables.com, has a new cookbook out, The Best Homemade Kids’ Snacks on the Planet*!  I have Laura’s first book (Best Homemade Kids’ Lunches*) and I think I may even like this one better! It’s going to be stained, dog-eared, and probably missing the back cover pretty soon. That’s how I know it’s a 5-star book :-)

I have a husband, a 23 year old boy, and 4 year old twin boys living at home. A lot of food passes through this house and having healthy snacks and/or snack-meals ready to go can be a challenge. How many Goldfish can a kid eat? (well, a lot, but the better question is how many should a kid eat!). I generally avoid boxed snacks, but get into snack ruts. It’s 4pm. Want a cheese stick? How about your 8th banana for the day? I think there’s like a tablespoon of oatmeal in the fridge leftover from breakfast two days ago.

There’s got to be a better way, right? It turns out there is!

Tons of snack recipes

The Best Homemade Snacks on the Planet* is absolutely packed with healthy snack recipes. Seriously, I wondered at first how anyone could write a 240-page cookbook just about snacks. But when I opened it I was gobsmacked with the number and variety of recipes!

So far I’ve made:

• maple cinnamon roasted chick peas p132
• greek deviled eggs p150
• elvis shake p183
• Pizza poppers p159

All of them were hits. One of the twins didn’t like the deviled eggs, but I was like, “whatever dude, more for me!” I was really dubious about whether the chick peas would go over well with the little ones (I knew the big folks would like them), but they loved them! They asked for the Elvis shake as a smoothie breakfast two days in a row. The pizza poppers were super simple to make and the whole batch disappeared in about 10 minutes. Next time I’m going to make a triple batch so I can have a bunch in the freezer.

Evil, thy name is Totino’s

My 23 year old knows that no Totino’s Pizza Rolls shall cross my threshold, so he was pretty interested in the idea of the pizza poppers. The poppers are NOT like those. They are more of a savory muffin and are not supposed to be a homemade version of the Totino’s. But big son admitted that having a much healthier option was a good idea. He really liked them and decided that they are indeed a pretty good substitute. Score!

When the twins were tiny I was always like, “I’m never going to let those kids eat in the car!” Enter reality. Sometimes we’re rushing from place to place so much that having packable snacks to eat on the go is an absolute sanity-saver. The chick peas and the pizza poppers will work great as on-the-go snacks and there are lots more in the book that will be car-worthy (i.e. not runny, not gooey, not sticky).

A very cool feature

The books is 8 chapters, each focusing on a category of snacks. The table of contents is color-coded and —this is so cool — the top of the pages are tipped with the corresponding colors! It’s easy to flip to the “baked bites” chapter when you know you’re looking for the red-tipped pages!

Last – there is a cool feedback chart in the back where you can track what you’ve made, whether/how much everyone liked it, and make notes. It’s not just big empty pages. It is a chart that lists Every Single Recipe In The Book. Is that freaking genius or what?

Laura is doing something really cool, signing a personalized bookplate to the first 100 pre-orders. All you have to do is send her a receipt of purchase (that shows a mailing address where she can ship it) to . Book plates will arrive separately from the book beginning mid-May.

Go pre-order* this right now, and then go check out the video promo for the book (but go buy it* first!).I feel so lucky that I got a free sneak peek preview copy of it. This is a 5-star book for me and it’s already on the shelf next my other oft-used cookbooks.