Kiersten’s Blog

I recently bought two new cookbooks.  One is Deceptively Delicious by Jessica Seinfeld.  The other is The Sneaky Chef Returns by Missy Chase Lapine.  I thought these would bring some great ideas into my normal cooking.  You see, the problem is, London doesn’t like vegetables.  At least she says she doesn’t like vegetables.  I try everything I can to trick her and make her eat them, but the fact of the matter is, if she thinks it might be a vegetable, she won’t eat it.  When I found these books, I thought it was the perfect solution.  And it would have been, except that it doesn’t work.  Somehow, that girl can identify vegetables in ANYTHING!  She doesn’t even know it’s vegetables.  She just knows that she doesn’t like it.  I thought it would be a no-fail with stuffed shells.  London loves cheese.  The vegetable (cauliflower) was hidden in the cheese, so even if she didn’t eat the rest, at least she would eat the cheese.  Wouldn’t you know, she announced after one bite, that she didn’t like that kind of cheese.  Okay, maybe I was a little too overzealous with that one.  I tried mozzarella sticks How could one go wrong with mozzarella sticks?  That cheese was no good either.  I have tried a number of concoctions with ideas from those two books.  Not one has worked.  Today was sweet potatoes in grilled cheese sandwiches.  I didn’t even like them.  For the record, Ashton loved it.  I just told London to cover it with ketchup and she wouldn’t taste it.  That’s what I did.  At least she ate it that way (and she got nutrition from tomatoes in the ketchup, which was probably more than she got from the sweet potatoes in the sandwich).

There is another reason these books don’t work for us.  I think the recipes are good ideas, but really, how much vegetable puree can one hide in any one thing?  Not much.  London would be better off to just eat two bites of sweet potatoes.  It would probably go down a little easier (at least faster) and it wouldn’t have to ruin her otherwise moderately healthy meal.

Verdict: it’s probably time to post the books back on Amazon and give up trying to get my 4-year-old to eat her veggies.