Sneaky Cuisine? Deceptively Delicious by Jessica Seinfeld

In the haze of memory a significant portion of my childhood was spent sitting at the dinner table, long after the dishes were done, over a portion of untouched green beans. We called them "string beans," back in those days, not without good reason, and the traditional Southern style of cooking rendered the beans limp and khaki-colored. That film of saturated pork fat that congealed on top didn't exactly enhance them as they cooled down either. My father and I had a classic power struggle going over those beans and their rightful place in my diet, and had it not been for my mother's common sense and mercy, I'd probably be sitting there still.

If this scenario sounds familiar, here's a children-and-food book with an interesting new twist, Jessica (wife of Jerry) Seinfeld's cute and clever cookbook titled Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food. I know. Some kids will compliantly down those two bites or finish their peas if those are the house rules. But some won't, no matter how firm or scary the parents are (and believe me, my dad could be more scary than present laws allow). So what does the nutritionally concerned parent do? Maturity will most likely take care of the pickiness problem, but knowing what we do about the crucial nature of early nutrition, do we want to wait?

Jessica Seinfeld votes for a little loving deception. Armed with a variety of pureed fruits and vegetables and some "whole foods" ingredients in the pantry, she advocates a bit of sneaky cuisine, sticking pumpkin puree into pancakes and cauliflower puree into mac and cheese. It's actually a pretty easy technique: with blenders, food processors, and baggies in every kitchen, it's simple enough to cook up a batch of fresh veggies (or use those leftovers from the dinners where only the adults had a serving), puree them, and pop those puppies into the freezer for the next kid pleaser menu. Her recipes have the criteria you could call the three P's: kid pleasing, easy to prep, and easy in the process.

What about teaching a "spirit of adventure" in eating? What about learning to appreciate a variety of taste and texture? Well, that's the goal, all right. But let's face it. Nature probably hardwired small children back in the cave days to resist strong or strange tastes and textures to protect them from eating spoiled or poisonous stuff, so the spicy variety that adults dote on is just not in the cards for most young ones. As Seinfeld also points out, "As I learned the hard way, the more pressure you apply, the more kids will "hate" certain foods." (Like, um, green beans)?

So she has devised stealth recipes which incorporate the five fruits and vegetables recommended for the daily diet into the foods her children already loved--chicken nuggets (with broccoli and/or spinach, beet, or sweet potato puree in the batter), yellow birthday cake (with canned pumpkin and fruit yogurt), chocolate chip cookies (with chickpeas pureed right in the batter), "green eggs" (with spinach puree), blueberry lemon muffins (with butternut squash puree), and chicken salad (with a dab of cauliflower puree). She swears the veggies blend right in with no discernable difference from the traditional taste. You can check out her recipe for brownies (with secret spinach and carrots) here.

Seinfeld is hard-nosed about reducing saturated fats and sugar in her recipes and insists on the importance of building into the diet ample calcium, protein, Omega 3 and 6, and vitamins, along with whole grains and lean meats. Her house rule is that you don't have to eat what's on your plate, but what's on the plate is all that is being served. She emphatically states that every recipe was soundly approved by her three children (2 picky eaters and 1 adventurer) before being included in the book. She also adds that her oldest, Sascha, 7, is interested in cooking, chiefly because she loves sweets and knows that homemade ones are the only ones she's going to get. (Sascha apparently still believes that everyone puts chickpeas in their Tollhouse cookies.)

Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food. is done up in a preppish pink and green, faux Betty Crocker ring binder, with illustrations that would be right at home in the 1950's edition. But despite its foofy packaging, there is some serious nutritional information inside along with the recipes. As I looked them over, the fruit and veggie purees recipes sounded like a good idea for the adults in the family as well. I mean, it couldn't hurt to get a few more vitamins and minerals and such into our bodies either. And maybe, while scarfing down these entrees, there'll be a subliminal (literally) effect on the tastebuds of tots that'll shorten the shakedown period for acquiring a fondness for those veggies.

BTW, Predictably, I loved green beans as soon as I started cooking them my way.