Evil Mommy Stunts

In my quest to get vegetables into my son's body, I have learned a couple of things: 1. you have to be persistent, but 2. you have to cut kids some slack at the same time. Apparently, from what I've learned, a taste for vegetables often involves having a palate that accepts 'bitter' tastes, but this kind of palate is not typically acquired until many years after a person is born. It kind of explains why kids don't like coffee, spinach, and dark chocolate, but most adults do. That being said, the vegetable component of the diet is all-essential, so we've got to find ways to pack the vegetables into him. A few days ago a Google search led me to this book by Jessica Seinfeld (yes, in case you're curious as I was, she is the wife of Jerry):


More importantly to my story, she is a mother of three children who has worked hard to innovatively sneak vegetables into her children's meals. Her battle tactic is to puree vegetables and mix them into delicious foods that kids will unsuspectingly eat. Her children have played right into her hands! So, on Monday Silas and I marched into the Moore Public Library and I promptly checked out this book, and I liked the ideas in it quite a bit so I ordered it on Amazon last night. Tonight at dinner was our first go-around, and I pureed a delicious butternut squash and mixed that puree right into a delicious pot of homemade mac-n-cheese. Silas went bananas for it. It really WAS good.

Also as part of dinner I whipped up a delicious "Pearnsip Sauce," courtesy of BJ's favorite chef, Alton Brown. I purposely picked a picture where he looks a little psycho. But he's not. Well, the pear sauce has the consistency of applesauce and is extremely delicious, but packs in a whole pound of parsnips, baby! I couldn't even tell. It was pretty great. Silas was hesitant about it, but it wasn't because of the taste...sometimes he just refuses to eat off a spoon no matter what it is. However, when BJ dipped banana slices into the sauce he ate it up, sometimes even sucking off the sauce and shooting the banana back out. Tomorrow I am going to pull even more Evil Mommy stunts by putting the Pearsnip Sauce into one of his empty beloved yogurt containers and fooling him. Although he will immediately be onto my hoax within one bite, I am hoping it tastes delicious enough that he won't care.

If you could read his happy mind right now, I think it would sound something like this. "Those suckahs. I got so full tonight and the only vegetable I ate was my favorite, sweet potatoes. I have them wrapped around my little finger."