Deceptively Delicious

If you're like most of us moms, getting your kids to eat vegetables is a never-ending battle. When M was a baby I dutifully fed her each type of vegetable to expand her palate. She grimaced at each spoonful of peas. She tolerated the green beans. She loved the apple-sweet potato. In fact, she was an orange vegetable-eater only. Carrots? Fine. Spinach? No way. Try to sneak even a single green bean on the spoon with some other food? She'd swish the food around in her mouth, eating the "good" stuff and hand me the solitary green bean. She has gotten better as she gets older. She loves to eat frozen peas (still frozen) as a snack. But if you even put a green bean on her plate she will act like you are trying to feed her poison.

K has been a better eater of vegetables. As a baby, he happily devoured any flavor I fed him. He's still more willing to try something new than his sister. Given a choice of meat or grapes (or olives, mashed potatoes, etc) he'll pick the fruit or vegetable every time. Unless it's chicken nuggets.

So when the ladies at 5 Minutes for Mom told their readers about the opportunity to review some books from HarperCollins I jumped at the chance to try Jessica Seinfeld's new cookbook Deceptively Delicious. I'd just read about it in one of my magazines and found the concept intriguing.




When the book arrived at my house I eagerly opened the package and began to skim the pages. Then I went back and actually read the introductory pages. The whole process of sneaking vegetables into my kids' (and my) food seems so simple from what I read. And supposedly the kids (and even Jerry) can't tell that the veggies are in there. Even in desserts.

Here's Jessica's method: she makes purees of various veggies. She spends a few hours a week preparing the purees for the week then freezes them in the amounts that she usually needs. Then, when she has a recipe that she sneaks some veggies in, she has her puree ready. She uses things like cauliflower because it is white and blends in easily with dishes like macaroni and cheese. Or she puts beets in brownies. (Okay, that one makes me feel a little nauseated.)

The cookbook is written for even the novice cook. She explains exactly how to prepare the purees. Each recipe tells up front what veggies you will be sneaking in. The recipes have cute little comments from her kids at the bottom of each page.

It's not "weird" food either. It's normal food that your kids will eat. And there won't be any visible chunks of green food to be handed back to you.

I confess I haven't tried any of the recipes yet, but I am going to try it. You never know, we might actually really like macaroni and cheese and cauliflower.