A book review

For months I've been eying a cookbook called Deceptively Delicious by Jessica Seinfeld and one written on a similar premise called The Sneaky Chef. Both include techniques and recipes for "hiding" pureed veggies in your food in an attempt to get kids to eat vegetables. When both books initially came out, I thought "I already do that." And I do indeed sneak vegetables in all kids of food: carrots and celery in marinara, spinach in meatloaf and turkey burgers, and zucchini in chili. I also put bananas and apples in my pancakes, various muffins, and cakes (when I actually bake). My reasoning behind this: neither C nor I have the best family medical history. I figure the healthier I can make meals the better. Plus, while C will eat just about anything I put in front of him (yes, following traditional gendered roles I do almost all of the cooking in our house!), but he will not seek out fruit or vegetables for a snack. So I figured any way I could get more vegetables in our diet was a good thing. As attractive as both of these cookbooks was to me, I figured I didn't need another cookbook, especially to teach me a technique I already use. I briefly reconsidered purchasing one of these when Academama wrote a review for Deceptively Delicious, but as we were in the middle of moving, I soon forgot about both.

Flash forward to the last few weeks. Now that we live in CU Land, we have all sorts of produce available to us that we couldn't purchase in Southwest College Town, and it is remarkably cheap. During a recent trip to the local farmer's market, I bought a butternut squash for 50 cents. I had no idea how to cook it, but I figured for 50 cents I could experiment. When C saw the squash he was aghast. He hates squash of any kind, with the exception of zucchini, which he has only recently started to eat. I think he assumed the squash would go bad before I could figure out how to get him to eat it. Then we visited some friends who had Deceptively Delicious, and I took the opportunity to read the cookbook.

My first reaction was that the text itself was incredibly annoying. Seriously, Jessica Seinfeld, Jerry's wife, includes cartoon images of herself and her children on each recipe and their comments. While the kids' comments are marginally cute, Seinfeld's comments are annoying and border on condescending. Here's an example: the cartoon Sasha, the Seinfelds' oldest child, says "I don't like avocado," to which the cartoon Jessica responds "Shhh, don't tell her it is in her quesadillas." I mean really, is that necessary? And this cutesy sort of thing is on almost every recipe. It makes me want to openly mock her. But I've got to admit, she's creative. And after flipping through the recipes I had about 15 different uses for that butternut squash that had been sitting on my counter for a week. Not only that, I learned I could make chocolate chip cookies with garbanzo beans, chocolate cake with pumpkin, and cauliflower in just about everything. Thus, I bought Seinfeld's book (as an aside, I chose this one over the other cookbook for only one reason: I like a cookbook that has photographs of the food accompanying each recipe.). With this cookbook's help, I feel like I have an easy way to make use of the fantastic (and way cheap!) produce that is now available to me. And, in my opinion, the best thing about this was that Wild Man and I spent Monday morning in the kitchen cooking and pureeing squash, sweet potatoes, and cauliflower. So I would recommend the book for the recipes, urging you to realize you can do all of this on your own and to ignore the annoying cartoon images and their commentary.