FUNNY FOOD: 365 Fun, Healthy, Silly, Creative Br

Not since Joost Elffers' Play With Your Food has food been so ridiculous and so endlessly diverting. Parents and children will giggle through breakfast. Teachers and students can laugh some more making snacks or desserts after lunch. This is a book filled with nothing but engaging spontaneity and simplicity that makes you say, I can do that. And, you can...the consequences are yummy.

These are not your mother's smiley-face sandwiches. In Bill's world, carrots turn into airplanes; boiled eggs into jugglers, and pears into guitar players. As gracefully as Picasso's ceramic plates found endless form so do Wurtzel's portraits, which seem to grow out of almost anything--cheerios and bananas; lox and bagels; oatmeal, blueberries, and strawberries. Sometimes you think he is portrait artist and you could swear you just saw Sigmund Freud emerging from a pear or Shakespeare growing out of an apple. Sometimes the plates are just plain fanciful. Your breakfasts don't have to look like they'll hang in the Louvre, he says. It's the gesture that counts. But it sure looks like he riffed on Matisse's paper cutout dancers with a papaya.

In addition to creating Funny Food - which contains both recipes and how-to photographs - Bill and Claire have been conducting workshops for children at Public School 188 on the Lower East Side of New York, teaching them to use their imaginations to improve their health rather than just putting lettuce and vegetables on their trays.