Title:	Recipe Road Trip, Cooking Your Way Across the USA: 120+ Delicious Recipes and Fun and Surprising Facts from Every State
	Author:	Nanette Lavin
	Published:	August 1, 2023, Kitchen Ink Publishing
	No. of Pages:	232
	Cover Price:	$24.95 Hardcover

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Recipe Road Trip, Cooking Your Way Across the USA: 120+ Delicious Recipes and Fun and Surprising Facts from Every State is a cookbook geared to older children and teens with fun recipes from every state. The recipes, however, aren’t really particularly appealing to children, and while some of the recipes are popular in the states featured, there doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason that the particular recipes were chosen. There are no notes at the beginning of each recipe that explain why the recipe was chosen, i.e., there is a recipe for Berger Cookies in Maryland. Unless you are familiar with Baltimore and the famous Bergers bakery, you won’t have any idea where Berger cookies come from and why they are a Maryland mainstay. Children as well as adults need more information to make the recipes appealing, especially to kids.

While the recipes are written in the traditional manner with the ingredients listed first, followed by step-by-step instructions, they will mean nothing to kids because there are no photographs – not a one. There are some illustrations on some recipes, but they don’t look like the dishes, and kids will not get excited about recipes that they are unfamiliar with and don’t know just what it is they are supposed to make.

The cookbook includes so called “facts” from each state, but some of them are a little misleading. For instance, it says that Jell-O is the official state food of Utah. That is not entirely true (it is only Utah’s official snack food) and there are several other state foods from Utah. I suspect that the same goes for “facts” from other states.

There are also some silly jokes at the bottom of some of the recipes that will appeal to kids.

All told, there are some good recipes, but most will appeal to adults, and kids will get bored since they won’t know what any of the finished recipes should look like. Too many important things are missing from this book to be recommended.

Special thanks to NetGalley for supplying a review copy of this book.