DECEPTIVELY DELICIOUS
That’s the title of a book that my mother gave me a few months ago, on the advice of my sister. (Thanks, Mom and Sue) This is not an advertisement — consider it a review. Click here to see the book.
Great book. Written by Jessica Seinfeld, wife of famous comedian Jerry Seinfeld. Concerned about nutrition and her kids’ pickiness, Jessica began sneaking blended vegetables into their ordinary favorites.
This works like a charm with smaller kids. With my older kids, who seem to have their nose in my kitchen business all the time, it’s not quite as successful. They eat, yes, but with suspicion. With the help of my husband, my older kids have learned to eat what is served, even if they don’t like it. We’re still working on the little ones.
“Deceptively Delicious” introduced us to the idea of putting peanut butter and brown sugar in muffins. They are OH-SO-GOOD! When you top them with a little extra brown sugar and put sweet potatoes or pumpkin into the batter, they are quite a crowd-pleaser. This can be done with any basic muffin recipe of course, and you could easily use applesauce or bananas, too.
Some of Jessica Seinfeld’s tricks are really great ideas - adding yellow squash puree to your Macaroni and Cheese, for instance, will fool your youngsters pretty easily. Some of her dessert recipes however, are still so loaded with sugar that I think you are fooling yourself if you think you are serving healthy food. A half cup of spinach puree in your blueberry bars doesn’t delete the cup of sugar. Anybody who has read many of my posts will know that I use sugar regularly, so I don’t want to sound like a hypocrite here, I just can’t fool myself into believing that anything with that much sugar should be considered healthy. I’m not accusing Jessica Seinfeld of this, either. She qualifies that sweets should still be very limited, but offers a way to redeem them a bit. It’s a good idea, really.
Jessica includes in her book a lot of other tips that will help you improve your child’s diet; offering a healthy veggie tray in that ‘hungry hour’ before meals, pureeing a lot of foods once a week (or less) and freezing in small amounts to use later, a great healthier cupcake recipe for the unavoidable school treats, plus a lot more.
I guess my summary is this: Great tips, great recipes. Don’t fool yourself - not everything in the book should be automatically considered health food. Also: don’t forget that eating foods that we don’t really like is an acquired skill and your kids should learn to do this, it really is essential in the long run.
Happy Cooking!
August 12th, 2008