The DISNEY EATS Cookbook Brings Magic to Everyday Cooking

It doesn’t matter if you’re a kid or just a kid at heart, making food is more fun when the recipes are cute. A new cookbook from Disney Editions recognizes this. Disney Eats: More than 150 Recipes for Everyday Cooking and Inspired Fun by Joy Howard focuses on combining Disney characters and stories with snacks, treats, and meals. That means you get things like a Minnie Mouse-inspired crudité platter. Who doesn’t need that in their lives? You also need the two recipes we’re happy to debut exclusively at Nerdist today.

Disney Eats cookbook cover

Disney Editions

These Disney Eats recipes feature Frozen‘s Olaf and Simba from The Lion King. Howard tells Nerdist, “These are definitely two of my favorites. I love that they don’t require hard-to-find ingredients or a ton of prep, and that you can immediately recognize the face of each character.”

As Howard points out, you can instantly tell who these treats are inspired by. The Olaf bento features the friendly snowman shaped from tortillas. Celery, cream cheese, olives, and a carrot complete his face. And as you can see in the recipe, Howard shares how to make Olaf come to life.

Olaf bento recipe

Disney Editions

Tortillas also come in handy for this Simba-inspired veggie platter. Red pepper strips make up the lion’s beautiful mane. They surround hummus. And though I enjoy eating vegetables as they are, I can recognize a Simba spread would be more appealing than my usual approach, which is just dunking vegetables right into the hummus container.

Simba veggie platter recipe

Disney Editions

Howard considers how the end result might look when she’s brainstorming. She says, “Whenever I’m creating recipes that are very visual, it completely changes the way I approach the development process. I might have a picture in my mind of what something will look like and then when I test it out it’s nothing like I imagined. Or a certain ingredient may work visually but doesn’t have the right flavor, so I have to rethink the entire thing. I enjoy the challenge of establishing harmony between how a recipe both looks and tastes. It’s sort of like wearing two artistic hats at the same time. My kids are big fans of my frequent visits to the candy aisle at the grocery store.”

Disney Eats: More than 150 Recipes for Everyday Cooking and Inspired Fun will be available wherever you buy books on October 6, 2020.

Featured Image: Disney Editions

Amy Ratcliffe is the Managing Editor for Nerdist and the author of The Jedi Mind, available for pre-order now. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.