Summer Reading Program 2014. Week 7: Food Science Storytime

And now that you've waded through all the massive piles of rejects for this week's program, here's the first set of actual program books!

Even Aliens Need Snacks
Matthew McElligott
ISBN: 9780802723987

Our narrator is an intrepid cook, creating fabulous concoctions like "an eggplant, mustard, and lemonade smoothie" that he thinks is great, and his older sister thinks is revolting.  Undeterred, he sets up a snack shack to sell his creations to friends and neighbors, but no luck.  After a day of no customers, he retreats to bed, but he hears a strange whirring sound - an alien has landed and is standing at his snack stand!  He quickly heads to the kitchen, whips up a snack, and before you know it, he's up every night serving all sorts of interesting foods to all sorts of interesting aliens!  Right before school starts back up, he goes all-out and creates a souffle out of everything he loves.  Sadly, it's not a hit, but he is still confident in himself.  He likes it after all, and the tag-page on the end shows his sister happily munching away on his latest creation.


Growing Vegetable Soup
Lois Ehlert
ISBN: 0152325751

I have yet to see a picture book do a better job of introducing the concept of gardening for food to little kids than this book here.  If I had to create a storytime collection, this would be one of my cornerstones.  It's bright, it's colorful, it's simple, it's an actual narrative storyline, and it doesn't muddy the concept up with imaginative flourishes (don't get me wrong, I like a good imaginative flourish as much as the next person, but there's a time and place).  Bright die-cut collage pages show disembodied hands in gloves planting, watering, weeding, and picking a variety of simplified garden plants, washing and cutting them up, and rendering them into lovely soup.  Simply perfect.


Rabbit Pie
Penny Ives
ISBN: 067005951X

If it wasn't so hot, and my kids weren't so wiggly, I would have preferred to do Cook-A-Doodle-Doo! instead, but this one also features a recipe, and a horde of wriggly baby bunnies getting settled in for the night and then fed lovely carrots in the morning, so it was a totally acceptable substitute.  The recipe is introduced first, and then the spreads illustrate the different steps of the recipe, like collecting your baby rabbits, and slowly adding 6 cups of milk.  Very sweet, lovely illustrations.