By Dina Eliash Robinson
Our FreeRangeClub.com (FRC) partner and nationally syndicated food columnist, Catharine Kaufman—known and celebrated as The Kitchen Shrink—raised and fed healthy fare to her two previously vegetable-averse daughters (and, in no small measure, her then junk-food-addicted ‘Big Kid’ spouse, Larry), by fooling their taste buds with the creatively disguised foods she describes in her recent column, “Tasty Treats Play Tricks on Kids” (http://freerangeclub.com/kids-kornercopia/tasty-treats-play-tricks-on-kids/), as well as by performing stand-up comedy routines she improvised to distract them. Her efforts to “help the medicine (i.e. wholesome nutrition) go down,” while skipping Mary Poppins’ prescribed “spoonful of sugar,” have paid off over the years, with the family kept in the pink and preferring to eat and cook healthy fare.
Catharine’s ‘routines’ became so popular with not only her family, but with the neighborhood kids and her daughters’ school chums who often crowded the Kaufmans’ dinner table, that she eventually gave in to their suggestion and wrote a book about her zaniest character. The result was “Jolene—The Adventures of a Junk Food Queen,” a humorous book for kids of all ages, with hilarious illustrations (by the brilliant John Martinez and Hayden Mills) bringing the story and everyone in it to vivid life.
With a fresh run of “Jolene….”, we are now able to fill orders for the book, which sells for $19.99, with free shipping. The book can also be purchased from Amazon.
