Blue Moon Soup: A Family Cookbook

by Gary Goss, Jane Dyer (Illustrator)

This collection of thirty easy-to-follow soup recipes for beginning cooks was chosen to appeal to every member of the family and features full-color illustrations. 25,000 first printing.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking, Picture Books, Childrens

80 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1999

Reviews

[Manybooks]

I absolutely love love love soups (and the breads etc. that go with soups), and yes, I have thus not only really enjoyed reading through Gary Goss's Blue Moon Soup: A Family Cookbook on Open Library (and also visually feasting my eyes so to speak on illustrator Jane Dyer's fanciful, colourfully expressive and often nursery rhymes inspired accompanying artwork, with I guess a bit of a pun also being intended here), I actually and in fact totally do feel like trying to make the vast majority of the presented soup recipes and accompaniments (and thus I am definitely and strongly considering purchasing a copy of Blue Moon Soup: A Family Cookbook for myself). For ALL of the featured recipes encountered in Blue Moon Soup: A Family Cookbook, they do look majorly temptingly delicious and I really do appreciate that Gary Goss features his soups seasonally (recipes for winter, spring, summer and fall), that he provides a nicely diverse selection of vegetarian/vegan and non vegetarian offerings (and also often lists alternatives for his meat products containing soups) and for me very importantly, that Blue Moon Soup: A Family Cookbook also provides and lists many cooking and food safety tips and hints, so that children cooking the featured soups by themselves should be able to accomplish this easily and safely (but older children, mind you, as I do think that the recipes Gary Goss provides in Blue Moon Soup: A Family Cookbook are perhaps just a bit too complicated for child cooks younger than seven or eight).

Finally, while Gary Goss' main textual body of Blue Moon Soup: A Family Cookbook is perhaps a bit too childish and sometimes a trifle too artificially humorous for my cookbook reading tastes, most children (in other words the intended audience) would likely find precisely Goss' funny asides entertainingly engaging. And indeed and truthfully, only my adult self has actually found Gary Goss' humour a bit frustrating for a cookbook, since my inner child has loved almost everything about Blue Moon Soup: A Family Cookbook to absolute bits and pieces (except the fact that there are no included photographs of the end products, which I do think is rather an oversight, and in particular for a children's cookbook, as having a child see what the end product should look like when preparing a recipe is in my opinion both important and necessary).

[Ronda]

A cookbook written and illustrated with a sense of humor, this gem of a cookbook begins with a lovely illustration of the Lewis Carroll poem "Turtle Soup"--no not showing the dish. Instead, the painting shows two turtles sitting at a table on the beach (tablecloth forms the backdrop for the poem), with a soup tureen between them. Be sure to read "A Letter from the Chef" at the beginning, and take some time just to enjoy the absolutely lovely (and often visually punny) illustrations. This is one cookbook that is fun to read and easy to enjoy, even if you never try any of the recipes.

[Dolly]

This is a nice collection of soup recipes that make me hungry. Our oldest has been bringing home lots of cookbooks from her elementary school library, so we had to read through this book together and decide which of the recipes we wanted to try. Overall, it's a bit advanced for a children's book, but we loved the different recipes and are inspired to make some soup!

[Christine]

Excellent recipes that kids will lap up every time!!

Our favorite is the one potato, two potato soup. Always a winner! Fun for the kids to hello make and easy for parents to help supervise.

[Sally]

The soups are good, and I just love the illustrations!

[Janet]

Very nice recipes.

[Valleri]

I enjoyed looking through all the delicious soup recipes and whimsical illustrations.

[mer]

Used to borrow this from the library semi- regularly as a kid. Never made any of the soups (except one, I do not remember which) but I loved reading about them like they were bedtime stories. My local library usually clears out some of their older catalogue items that are out of print and not frequently sought after, so imagine my heartbreak realizing they no longer have this... What if after twenty (20) years I was finally about to make the soups...

[Anna]

Two stars

only because the illustrations were cute and names were fun. Otherwise, it is just a basic book of soup recipes.

[Alex Cline]

This is the most darling cookbook.

[Yycdaisy]

3 Stars maybe 4 Stars? Depends on who's looking at it perhaps. This would be a good one to use to introduce a young person to cooking things that are not cookies. The recipes all have cutesy names but are just good, simple recipes for soups and other one pot dishes. The bad thing about the cutsey names is you might have to use the index to actually find the recipe you want. The index uses more standard names like Tomato Bisque instead of Bisque in the Sun for example.