There are many reasons to envy my girl Melissa (of Melissa The Mouth fame), not the least of which is that her two girls will eat anything. Now, I don’t aspire to be the gourmand she is – I can bake and I can boil up a mean bowl of spaghetti but I honestly just don’t enjoy being in the kitchen – and having two young children that get excited about hummus? That’s pretty huge. And certainly enviable. My own Babe is currently stuck on the standard toddler diet: yogurt, bread, crackers, fruit (thankfully, she isn’t at all picky about what kind of fruit so there’s a tiny bit of built-in variety) and soy milk. Booooring. And I’m not usually down for the whole sneaking-it-in method of getting kids to eat veggies. My logic is thus: if she likes something but doesn’t know she likes it then that “good eating habit” is going to be completely forgotten the moment she leaves home. I want her to know what she’s eating.
So when my friend gave me a cookbook for my birthday last year (I don’t want to give it more publicity than it has already gotten but I guarantee you’ve seen the one I’m talking about. Non-chef, celebrity-wife author with an allegedly ripped-off premise. Yeah, that one), I flipped through it and enjoyed the photography but never even thought about diving into any of the recipes. But the guilt of having it just sit there on my shelf for a year, coupled with the guilt of not having made a real-from-scratch meal lately, got to me and I decided to attempt something called Aloha Chicken Kebabs last night. Except I didn’t have any skewers so they were, technically, just chicken fingers. You see how it goes? Slacking from the start.
99% of the secret veggies ingredients in the book are pureed so I dug out my mother-in-law’s ancient, tiny, crusty Cuisinart. Feel free to giggle at it and, rest assured, I gave it a good scrubbing before I put any produce inside.
My stickless kebabs called for purees of pineapple and sweet potato. Delish, right?
Meh. Not so much. First of all, the directions in the book are dubious at best. Steam the sweet potatoes for 40-45 minutes? Are you kidding? I put them on the stove for 15 and they were soft and bright orange and ready to go. And then to cook the prepared chicken in 1 tablespoon olive oil on medium/high heat? Not gonna work. The outsides burned before the inside even warmed up. So the first batch was a test and the pictures unfit to print. The second batch was a better success but it turns out she really isn’t kidding about that whole secret ingredients thing. The only thing I could taste was the flax seed meal that I had mixed into the bread crumbs (flax is the one thing I can’t sneak past myself). So it was okay, but not what I expected. If I had to do it over again I would leave out the flax and add some coconut.
But I think I will skip the dinner next time and go right to the spinach brownies. After all, the whole point was to get Babe to eat something and she wasn’t going anywhere near those chicken parts. Something tells me I’ll have a bit more luck when chocolate is involved.
We have the same cookbook, and I agree with you that sneaking food into a child’s new palate is silly. We need to know what they LIKE! And yes, the recipes are a little wonky, I agree with you there. My first recipe were the chicken nuggets which we made with pureed spinach. I had a mess of leftover puree from it, which I froze for another day, but the nuggets were outstanding. Definitely worth a try, especially if you can get your little girl to make them with you, messy but fun. And thanks for the shout-out. I see you’re moving. Can’t wait to see what you come up with. (And is the move for the same reason as the one that caused you to shut down for a while?)
I will definitely try the nuggets next, then.
This move is for a totally different reason. I have higher aspirations for my blog visually and I’ve found that I can handle the customization more easily on blogger. (Or at least that I can find someone else who is able to do it up right for me.)