Whole Family Recipes: For the Childbearing Year and Beyond

Patty Brennan, ed.

[2007, Ann Arbor, Michigan: Center for the Childbearing Year; 204 pages, soft cover.]

[Review first published in Midwifery Today Issue 84, Winter 2007, © 2007, Midwifery Today, Inc. Review by Cheryl K. Smith.]

Whole Family Recipes is a nifty little book with recipes and tips for pregnant moms, as well as for the kids, once they start eating. The chapter “The Birth Marathon: Food and Drink for Labor and Birth” was excerpted in The Birthkit, Issue 56, Winter 2007.

While not a vegetarian cookbook, Whole Family Recipes has a variety of nutritious vegetarian recipes, such as kale chips, Mexican tofu and vegetarian chili. It also has recipes for when kids are sick, as well as food for play, like peanut butter balls. This book is great for the whole family. The book was a community effort, with money from sales going to support the efforts of the nonprofit Center for the Childbearing Year (CCY) to provide free doula care to low income pregnant women and their families. Contributors included local midwives, doulas, moms and dads, and it is illustrated with children’s drawings of their favorite foods.

Reviewer Cheryl K. Smith is managing editor for Midwifery Today and publisher of Ruminations, the Nigerian Dwarf and Mini Dairy Goat Magazine, as well as raising a small herd of mini dairy goats in the coast range of Oregon.

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