Better Homes and Gardens thinks "Junior" is code for "full of canned fruit"

July is almost over! If you haven't done anything fun with the kids out on summer break (if you were careless enough to have kids in the first place...), then you'd better hurry up and figure out a few projects before school starts back up.

If you need some ideas, Better Homes and Gardens New Junior Cook Book (1979) is here to help. One of the most interesting things about this book is visible right on the cover-- cooking is shown as an activity for both girls and boys (unlike the 1955 version with the cartoon of a perky teenage girl on the cover). The more open gender-roles are shown in the rest of the book, too. The illustration for the main dishes chapter shows a father and son cooking together, for example, balancing out the trio of girls making salads at the beginning of the salad chapter. (BHG doesn't get too carried away, though, as you probably could have guessed which image went with the main dish and which with the salads without much trouble!)

Even if I am interested in the gender roles, you're probably more interested in the recipes.

If your kids are like me and despise too much sweet mixed in with the savory, then Peachy Beef Stew might make them ready to head back to school.

Granted, this is a pretty standard beef stew if you leave out the can of sliced peaches, so if you don't fancy syrupy peaches bobbing in the tomato sauce along with the onion, zucchini, and carrots, this one might be pretty easy to remedy. (You could even go crazy and throw in some herbs since the only seasoning in the recipe is salt.)

The most fun recipes are the salads that double as craft projects, though.

We'll start with the least impressive.

Flower salad just doesn't look all that much like a flower. It's more like a star fish being covered in tiny packing peanuts that are beamed down by a miniature UFO. Wait, that simile just made the salad seem waaay cooler.

On the cuter end of the spectrum, we have a summer-appropriate smiling bug!

From its multitude of carrot curl legs (enough to make me point out that this must be a mite or spider rather than a bug!) to its cherry stem antennae and cherry slice smile, this is adorable. It's also mostly fruit, so it should be a pretty easy sell.

And best of all, the last salad is a two-fer!

Not only do diners get adorable twin mice, but they also get to eat marshmallow ears on pear halves, making this one of the few salads that magically transforms marshmallows from dessert to salad without the intercession of Jell-O! The kids are sure to love it.

Thanks to my sister for the very early birthday present so I would have time to enjoy this before school starts and I have to rely on canned posts from summer vacation to keep the blog going. Now I'm off to make an adorable salad alien out of canned pears dyed green, sugar snap pea arms and legs, carrot curl antennae, and a bell pepper probe.