Handstand Kids Mexican Cookbook

This giveaway is now closed. Congratulations to our three winners: Tati, Silvia and Renee G.!!

Roxana first found this cookbook when she wrote about new bilingual toys for 2009. We were instantly fascinated by the genius idea of creating a set of multicultural cookbooks with the aim of teaching children about different countries’ customs and languages via food. That just seemed so correctly in tune with our mission to raise bilingual and bicultural children through fun and meaningful activities.

We’ve written several posts under the category of The Culture of Food because we truly believe that our traditional foods are one of the easiest and tastiest ways to connect our children with our roots, as well as an excellent way to open them to other cultures.

I set out on a mission to get my hands on a copy of the Handstand Kids Mexican Cookbook to use for my own family and to review for you. Lucky me, the Handstand ladies found us first!

I was all smiles when I opened up the huge envelope and found a large plastic tortilla bag with a Handstand Kids Mexican Cookbook and a child-size oven mitt inside!

Let me tell you why I love this book:

• The packaging concept is genius–a zippered tortilla bag!
• The illustrations are super lively and colorful without overwhelming the large, easy-to-read text for the recipes.
• The concept of the five multicultural/multilingual  “Handstand Kids” amigos makes this relevant to their target age of children 3-11.  You will find all five kids in each of the three cookbooks in the series (Italian, Mexican and Chinese). It’s the whole concept of friends going on cooking adventures together and learning from each other. Love it.
• The foreword by one of today’s top Latin chefs,  Aarón Sanchez, author of La Comida del Barrio.
• Two pages with beautiful illustrations of the most common utensils and ingredients with their names in both Spanish and English. This is perfect if you just feel like sitting down and pointing to the objects while your child tells you or reads what they each are.
• My favorite fruit (or is it a veggie? We’ll never know for sure), aguacate (or palta…the debate continues) is used to determine the recipe’s level of difficulty for your kid. One avocado means a kid can do most of the steps by himself; four avocados means an adult will need to help her with the entire recipe.
• THE RECIPES! Camila still has another year to go before she can start experimenting with these recipes on her own, but that doesn’t mean she can’t start to savor the Fiesta Corn, or the Mexican Cookies, or the Chilaquiles, or the Shredded Chicken Tostadas, or…OK..I’ll stop myself here!
• All the recipes keep in mind how complicated we’ve become with our eating habits by providing vegetarian and low-fat alternatives, as needed.
• Mexican-ize My…This segment of the book has recipes that are common dishes your kid loves to eat and “mexicanizes” them. So, if chilaquiles just sound plain weird to him, you can just say you’re making lasagna into chilaquiles. Or sandwiches into tortas; or grilled cheese into quesadillas. Get it?
• Not only does this book promote the love of food, languages and cultures but also of giving. In one of the illustrations the Kids are holding a food fundraiser, selling tacos to raise money for the Common Threads charity.

Now, here’s a free tip for you:  You can try out some of the recipes that they’ve made available via their website by going here.

While there, check out the colorful placemats with the Mexican (or Italian or Chinese) map on one side and the Handstand Kids on the other. The mats themselves are a great gift for your bilingual learner!

I definitely don’t want to be the only one having all the fun with this cookbook-Roxana is already jealous as it is! So, Handstand Kids has offered to give away a copy of their Mexican Cookbook Kit to THREE winners, all in the spirit of some Bilingual Summer Fun!

To enter to WIN:

For your chance at being one of the THREE winners, all you need to do is visit the Handstand Kids website and tell us who your favorite Handstand Kid is and why. Please be as specific as possible so we know you’ve visited their site.

If you want to increase your chances of winning you can get additional entries by doing any of the following:

1.  Blog and/or tweet about this giveaway or about our whole week of Bilingual Summer Fun giveaways. Please leave an additional comment with the link.

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This contest will close tonight at midnight EST…so don’t hesitate and enter now. It could be yours!!!

For the part that nobody likes, but we’ve gotta have, check out the Giveaway Rules.

Make sure you come back tomorrow and the rest of this week for more Bilingual Summer Fun giveaways!