Deceptively Delish!

I bought the book Deceptively Delicious by Jessica Seinfeld the other day on a recomendation from my little sis. The idea (in case you're living inside a cave and haven't heard about this book) is that you make fruit and vegetable purees and you hide them inside regular dishes so that your kids get a healthy amount of vegetables every day. Jessica also says that you should serve whole vegetables along side the meal just like you normally would so your children get used to seeing and eating them this way.

I'm not going to get into the controversy that this is plagerized - I have no idea. I think this is a fairly brilliant idea and I know many people who have been doing this forever. I tend to hide things in my spaghetti sauce and lasagana anyway. I also feel the need to say that my kids are very good at eating their vegetables. Their favorites are broccoli, peas (still frozen even) and squash. But I feel it never hurts to add more vegetables into their diet.

I've tried 2 recipes so far... the "Buttered" noodles and the spaghetti sauce. The noodles call for margarine, squash puree, milk and parmeasan cheese on the noodles. I made it without the cheese and with soy milk instead so that Lily could eat it. It was fantastic! The squash I used was acorn squash out of my garden. My husband doesn't normally touch squash and he had seconds of the noodles. In fact, he asked me what was in it since he knew it couldn't be cheese. I served it with a chicken & olive skillet thing that I make and it really went well. The spaghetti sauce was just jarred sauce with broccoli puree. Again, the kids ate a ton of it!

Since I rarely follow a recipe to the letter, I'm branching out tonight. We're going to have pancakes with fruit puree in it. I'm hoping that this turns the pancakes a nice pink color. :) Not much different than putting whole fruit in pancakes, but still yummy and slightly different enough. There's a banana french toast recipe that is begging to be made also.