Busy Broccoli

Best Food Friends

by Catherine Chapman

Best Food Friends books are designed to teach kids to like fruit and vegetables by introducing them to fun and engaging characters. The stories teach children the fundamental skills of life and how to relate to different personalities. The Best Food Friends series makes it easy for parents to encourage their children to talk about fruit and vegetables and the characters are an excellent tool to help families make better food choices to improve overall health.

Busy Broccoli loves to dance. He raps, taps, turns and claps. Then one day in the restaurant where he lives the music stops and Busy can't dance anymore. Poor Busy, will he ever dance again?

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Hi I'm Busy Broccoli

Here are some facts about me: I am a multi vitamin, full of goodness. I contain vitamin A,B,C,E and K with minerals like calcium for strong bones and muscles, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, sodium and Zinc.

Wow! I am bursting with antioxidants to keep your cells healthy.

I give you lots of energy to help you run and play each day. "Put steamed broccoli on your plate Sprinkle with cheese to make it taste great." Brocca-Rocka!

35 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Catherine Chapman has always loved telling stories and creating characters for kids. As a teenager, she would climb onto the roof of her parent's house and dangle fairies and puppets (that she had created) in front of the window to entertain her younger siblings and their friends.

Catherine married and had her own children and was soon faced with the fact that they had a 50% chance of developing diabetes. Unfortunately, her husband had a family history of the disease.

Catherine knew she had to find a way to teach her kids to eat healthy. She studied nutrition and in an attempt to entice her children to like fruit and vegetables, she created a series of characters and wrote fun stories about them.

This worked so well that her characters are now being used to teach healthy eating in schools, and her series of books have been published in China.

Studying as a health coach with the Institute of Integrative Nutrition and certified in childhood and adolescent nutrition (establishing healthy eating patterns) Catherine is passionate about teaching kids to like fruit and vegetables and helping families make better food choices.

With diabetes, heart disease and obesity on the rise, there is no doubt our world is in crisis. Teaching children to eat well at an early age is paramount.

Catherine's series of books are now available as ebooks, giving kids everywhere the benefit of learning about fruit and vegetables through her fun and engaging characters.

Reviews

[Maranda Russell · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Busy Broccoli: Best Food Friends” by Catherine Chapman is a cute children’s picture book story about a bunch of vegetables (with Broccoli being the main character of course) who live in an Italian restaurant. The vegetables love their home, and especially love dancing to the Italian music the restaurant owner plays while she cooks, but what will happen to them when the restaurant is sold to a new owner who doesn’t play music and doesn’t seem to need the vegetables anymore? This is the position Busy Broccoli finds himself in. I won’t give away the ending, but I will say it is satisfactory and not exactly what I expected.

I do have one major complaint about the book, and that is simply that it was really hard to read on Kindle Cloud Reader. I’m not sure if that is the fault of Amazon or whoever formatted the book, but the print was really small and hard to read and I wasn’t able to change it using Kindle’s normal features.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Busy Broccoli: Best Food Friends by: Catherine Chapman is a fun book to read to your children that will encourage good healthy eating habits by bring vegetables to life in this short story. It’s about the vegetables that live in an Italian restaurant, they become upset when their world is renovated, however it becomes a happy ending when everyone is where they belong. It is 30 pages long and a very cute story. I recommend readers 14 and under or adults to read to children and get acquainted with Busy the dancing broccoli.
The idea is to make food fun so that it is fun to eat the healthy diet such as fruits and vegetables and mama’s cooking from the restaurant, very young children will enjoy this book more than older children in my opinion.

[Chelseyam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a very picky eater as a child. So, now that we’re introducing our daughter to foods, I want her to feel like they are something she will want so that she can learn to love them. She’s a bit too young to grasp the meaning of the story now, but I feel this book will be a great tool in the future. The story itself was very cute and a lot of fun to read to her. I like the concept of bringing to life such a difficult food to get children to enjoy in order to make them feel more comfortable with the item. I remember thinking broccoli looked weird as a kid, so there was no way I was touching it. Hopefully, this story will make the food easier to accept, so we don’t have to battle over healthy foods as she grows.

[Jimmy Jefferson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Educational read for parents to share with children

This is a great read for parents and children. The story is about eating healthy and why fruits and vegetables should be important parts of our diet. The author and illustrator do a great job of presenting some good information in a format that is easy for parents to share with their children. Would reccomed this as a tool to use when talking to our children about healthy eating.