Sick of all the bad news in the papers, on TV and on the radio?

Then start your day with laughter – with giggles, smiles, cackles, chortles, chuckles, glee, or even a small titter. Funny Food: 365 Fun, Healthy, Silly, Creative Breakfasts by Bill & Claire Wurtzel (Welcome 2012) is the anecdote to winter blahs or bad news blitz. Funny Food is all about taking healthy breakfast foods, creating Art on the plate, and then eating.

Is this a book for the under-eight set?

Perhaps, but older kids and adults will share the fun. Just as obento box lunches have become popular – with competitive Moms and Dads creating edible Art work in their kids’ compartmental lunchboxes, the Wurtzels take on breakfast. With a palette of eggs, waffles, pancakes, oatmeal, cereal, fruit and nuts, they create fried egg birds, oatmeal faces, and waffle animals.

Claire writes in the introduction:

It’s a joy and an act of love to start the day with an artistic, healthy breakfast. Bill, an artist and jazz musician, considers these dishes as fleeting improvisations – moments of pleasure that are to be consumed and disappear like the Mandela sand painting of Tibetan Lamas.

The idea is to encourage children to explore their food, create artistic masterpieces and then eat up their healthy breakfasts.

The first chapter, The Good Egg, starts with a photograph of an egg creature, with a toast body and limbs, two fried eggs head with googly eyes, and tomato slices for expression. One page shows the eggs turning into bicycle wheels. The bicyclist and bicycle are made out of sticks of carrot and celery. Another turns scrambled eggs into hair with ham as a face, or scrambled eggs become a ballet skirt on a toast ballerina. Her feet are strawberries.

There is a recipe for Whole Wheat Pancakes followed by plenty of pancake-shape inspire Art: a duck, a man playing the banjo, a tree with a bacon trunk. Strawberries, blackberries and bananas are turned into butterflies almost too cute to eat.

Children will enjoy flipping through the wonderful photographs in Funny Food and then designing their own yummy and healthy breakfast creations. Better get out the camera!

For more information, checkout: www.funnyfood.us