Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

First off, being 7 years and innumerable cookbooks into parenthood, I am automatically suspicious of ANY cookbook claiming to have recipes "your kids will love!" It's a marketing gimmick; no one can truly claim it because kids are so darn different and impossible to predict or categorize. I'd love a cookbook to be honest and say things like, "three actual kids liked this recipe", or better yet, "three out of ten kids said they liked it after we shoved it down their throat five times in two months." I would buy that book. I digress. When my 6-year-old told us she wanted to be vegetarian, we were supportive. We're major meat eaters but we all agreed we could go meatless more often and adjust some of our family habits to accomodate her. I'm a decent cook but haven't worked much with tofu and I thought I'd check out a few veg cookbooks to get some more ideas. This one looked promising from high reviews. My daughter's somewhat picky, and like most of us eats with her eyes first, so I told her when the cookbook came we could look through it together and try what looked good. But there are NO PHOTOS. NONE except the cute front cover. It's printed on b&w text paper, like a regular book with no pictures. There are some unrelated kid scribbly drawings in there to take up space between recipes, but no photos! We were both bummed. So then we resorted to reading through the recipes. I was still hopeful until I got a few pages in. Really? They took up print space to write a recipe for stirring applesauce and brown rice together? "Rice Surprise", page 27. Or "Firefighter French Fries", p.46, which is cutting up sweet potatoes into strips and baking them. Yeah sweet potato oven fries are good but I don't need a cookbook to tell me how to make them. I must be a better cook than I thought. Or how about "Apple Dips", p. 88 (apple slices with peanut butter. My favorite, and most confusing, might be "Eggless Humpty Dumpty Salad", p.40. It's like an egg salad made with tofu instead of eggs, and I quote directly, "The combination of mashed tofu and turmeric gives this dish the consistency and color of egg salad. In fact, some people won't even notice it has no eggs!" Raise your hand if your kid thinks turmeric tastes like eggs just because it's yellow. Why not...just make egg salad with eggs? It's not a vegan cookbook, although many recipes in it are vegan, and each recipe is clearly labeled "vegetarian" or "vegan." But many of the recipes have eggs. Just not the egg salad. I am pointing out the ridiculous extremes, it's true. I concede there are some recipes that look OK. But I'm ticked about the lack of photos and the general simplicity (toaster waffles spread with peanut butter and bananas, hey thanks for that revelation! And some of the other recipes, that look like actual recipes, just don't sound that good to me, and how can I serve something up I don't like myself? (Like "Okra Casserole for Busy People", p.82 - canned okra, brown rice, green chilies and plain tomato sauce, eew!) It's not the lack of literal meat that bothers me - I WANTED a veg cookbook. But there are few spices, even salt & pepper, or appealing flavor combos, or really anything in here I can imagine my kid "loving." Oh, well, back to the search function.