When the daughter-in-law next door sends a message asking if you can take the two grandsons for a couple of hours and feed them lunch, it will be very helpful to have a copy of Great Grub from the Meerkat Café: a Safari Adventure in Your Own Burrow on hand. It solves the problem of what to do for entertainment and what to eat for lunch all at the same time.
This is not a book to be read from beginning to end but a cookbook with embellishments or a nonfiction book with flourishes. Each spread has a section of information about the meerkat or one of its neighbors, an African proverb, and a recipe from the Meerkat Café.
The boys and I picked a couple of recipes. The first, of course, was a sweet as we prepared the Mud Dauber Toffee Bars. Since we were not able to round up the 6 ounces of mud dauber wasps the recipe called for, we took the suggested substitution of 6 ounces of chocolate chips. While we waited for them to bake, we read the information on the page describing Meerkat mobs and Mud Dauber homes and families. Then we discussed the entry’s African proverb, “The better the sweet, the more wasps to eat.”
Our second recipe was Dung Beetle Pancakes. We substituted crumbled bacon for the 8 dung beetles called for in the original recipe since we don’t seem to have any of the beetles on our place. Our very entertaining information focused on the dung beetles’ diet of poop and their tendency to play with their food. The proverb brought a laugh, “Every Dung Beetle is a gazelle in the eyes of its mother.”
I recommend this book for any caretaker who wants to enjoy entertaining boys, or even girls. I will leave one word of warning. The next time the mother asks if you can take the children for a while and feed them lunch, one of them may ask the same question I got. “Are we eating at the Meerkat Café?”
Maybe today we’ll do Centipedes in Blankets or Muffins with Red Velvet Ant Filling.