They’re easy. They’re silly. They’re healthy. They’re clever. They’re artistic. They’re delicious. They’re fun. They’re a great way to start the day. One breakfast at a time, Bill and Claire Wurtzel are determined to make you laugh and eat and play and laugh some more. Riffing over the years with oatmeal, eggs, apples, and nuts, it is finally ours to share…Funny Food!
Not since Joost Elffers’ Play With Your Food has food been so ridiculous and so endlessly diverting. Parents and children will giggle through breakfast. Teachers and students can laugh some more making snacks or desserts after lunch. This is a book filled with nothing but engaging spontaneity and simplicity that makes you say, “I can do that.” And, you can…the consequences are yummy.
Really, who doesn’t like to play with food? Bill Wurtzel, a jazz guitarist, has been making these plates for his wife, Claire, for as many years as they’ve been married. Now they are turning a hobby into an art form with a social message. Their goal is to discourage obesity by inspiring children—and adults—to improve their eating habits by creating meals and snacks that are not only nutritious, but fun.
These are not your mother’s smiley-face sandwiches. In Bill’s world, carrots turn into airplanes; boiled eggs into jugglers, and pears into guitar players. As gracefully as Picasso’s ceramic plates found endless form so do Wurtzel’s portraits, which seem to grow out of almost anything—cheerios and bananas; lox and bagels; oatmeal, blueberries, and strawberries. Sometimes you think he is portrait artist and you could swear you just saw Sigmund Freud emerging from a pear or Shakespeare growing out of an apple. Sometimes the plates are just plain fanciful. “Your breakfasts don’t have to look like they’ll hang in the Louvre,” he says. “It’s the gesture that counts.” But it sure looks like he riffed on Matisse’s paper cutout dancers with a papaya.
In addition to creating Funny Food – which contains both recipes and how-to photographs – Bill and Claire have been conducting workshops for children at Public School 188 on the Lower East Side of New York, teaching them to use their imaginations to improve their health “rather than just putting lettuce and vegetables on their trays.”
Product Features
- 365 incredibly fun breakfasts!
- Assemble common breakfast ingredients into culinary works of art.
AWESOME totally recommend this book. Only thing is that the book is all about breakfast and is sort of stuck on eggs, oatmeal, and fruit recipes/creations.
Wonderful book to do projects with kids With the perfect combination of an artist-educator Bill and Claire Wurtzel created Funny Food, a book aim for children. But their breakfast ideas are equally well suited to serve for guests whether friends or family. You don’t have to be an artist to create most of the 365 breakfast ideas but it helps to have some artistic inclinations. This is a picture book with photos illustrating the many, many ideas the authors came up with, most very funny. They may be simple and easy to reproduce but some are hard (such as reproducing Mona Lisa painting). Yet these are ideas, and once you tried a few, you are on your own to create a breakfast with your child from available ingredients. You must have ideas ready, work fast and have very warm plates handy so hot items like fried eggs, fresh pancakes or a bowl of oatmeal remain hot. Each creation stresses nutrition as well thus ingredients are not chosen haphazardly. The photos range from quarter-page to full page size and there is very little text. The four chapters include eggs, waffles/pancakes, oatmeal/cereal/fruit and toast/bagels/snacks. The book is small with sturdy splash-resistant pages. Great project with kids. (As reviewed for Sacramento/San Francisco Book Review.)