I read the cookbook Deceptively Delicious by Jessica Seinfeld to find out if my children would really eat veggies deceptively cooked into meals. I love the cookbook because it has great pictures and a terrific layout. She also has some great suggestions. For example she suggests putting a dish of berries on the table while you are making breakfast or cut veggies with a dip while you are making dinner. The kids can snack on them while they are waiting to eat. This has worked for me. My children will consume an entire serving of veggies/fruits prior to dinner. With my children either in school or daycare most of the day I am concerned about the amount of fruits and veggies they are eating or not eating. Most days I find they are coming up short. So I decided to give some of the recipes a try.
First I decided to make the recipes without the deceptive veggies because my children have never had some of them, like Egg Puffs in the breakfast section. I substituted 1/2 cup of cheddar cheese for the 1/2 cup squash. My children loved them and I now have a new breakfast meal. However fast forward a week and remove the cheese from the egg puffs and the kids ate them but were far less enthusiastic. I decided not to go the third step because it was clear adding 1/2 cup of squash to this dish would be noticeable.
I did add the deceptive veggies to the Buttered Noodles recipe and found my children thought they were "OK". As I was being deceptive I felt guilty about it and it took a lot of work. Then my thought was as I was deceptively blending squash -" OK, I'm feeding my kids 1/2 cup of squash in 4 servings of noodles. How much of a serving does that really make? " For the time and effort does this make sense? The answer for me on most the recipes was no, because I'm short on time and it seems to me every meal would have to have deceptive veggies to finally tally a serving by the end of the day.
I liked the cookbook and it gave me some great ideas in my efforts to find ways to be healthier, but it will take some more experimenting to make this particular method work for me.
2 comments:
My sister bought me this book last year. I liked the concept, but my kids didn't really like the food. Then I got to thinking about it. I want to teach my kids to like vegetables in ways that they are traditionally prepared, and not hidden in brownies, etc. We're still trying!
Ok- i need to try this because my kids take forever to eat their veggies- unless it's strawberry spinach salad with sweet dressing
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