Stealth Vegetable Smackdown
Written By Catherine Newman
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Newman (Catherine) takes on Seinfeld (Jessica) and the whole hide-your-veggies craze.
Recipes:
Chinese Take Out Vegetables
Dips and Dressings
Golden Cauliflower and Candied Root Vegetables
When my father was a boy, my grandma once told him to pack his suitcase for a little vacation — a little vacation that involved a masked Dr. Somebody knocking him unconscious and yoinking out his tonsils. Now that's the kind of deception I'm morally opposed to. But you want to Houdini some chickpeas into your child's birthday cake? You want to fold a Hubbard squash discreetly into her baked Alaska? Be my guest. I'm just saying — don't come crying to me when she's all grown up, sending her asparagus back to the chef to please be turned into a whoopie pie.
Surely, unless you've been living under a pumpkin, you've noticed the trend toward vegetable concealment popularized by such best sellers as Missy Chase Lapine's The Sneaky Chef and Jessica Seinfeld's Deceptively Delicious. Both books offer two-step recipes that ask you first to purée a nutritious ingredient and then to disguise it as a scrumptious something that your hapless children will devour. Vegetables masquerade as muffins and meatballs, and as far as the kids are concerned, what they don't know won't send them from the table gagging. As a person who has offered my children such cheerfully bogus choices as, "The fancy toothpaste or the yummy toothpaste?" I don't have an ethical problem with guerrilla nutrition. I have a practical one: Sneaking wholesome purées into your children's food may acquaint their bodies with valuable vitamins, fiber, and phytonutrients, but it does not acquaint their palates with vegetables', well, vegetableness. How will they ever learn to like vegetables if the vegetables are always — to quote The Godfather — disappeared?
This is to say nothing of the fact that the method often calls for vegetable portions best suited to the nutritional requirements of Thumbelina. A quarter cup of mashed cauliflower lurking in a dish that serves eight — isn't that, like, a teaspoon per serving? If I'm feeding my kids a mere teaspoon of cauliflower, I'm just going to make them choke it down off the actual spoon like medicine. I don't really have time to be whisking it into a lemon meringue tartlet.
I've been known to obscure a bit of kale in their black beans, a little broccoli under their nachos. It's fine to fortify less wholesome dishes with more wholesome ingredients. Didn't your own mom make you zucchini bread and carrot muffinsway back when? It was neither a trick nor not a trick — but you ate them and liked them and everyone was happy.
While I'm at it, let me be clear here that I'm also all for spin. I have, for example, called roasted vegetables "root candy"; I once considered melting a bit of jam over some limas because I thought it would be hilarious to call them "jelly beans." But where stealth is a kind of culinary dead end, spin is more like a bridge conveying your children from ignorance and dread to the promised land of the vegetable eaters.
Or this is what I tell myself. Because when it comes to vegetables, I'm also a romantic. I think vegetables are delicious, and I presume that my children will too. To this end, there are some important principles to keep in mind, like starting with great vegetables — ideally local, organic, and in season, but short of that, simply as fresh and enticing as possible.
But my real solution? Honestly? You're going to hate me because this is not a quick fix in a freezer bag or the key buried in a sloppy joe. It's patience. I put kale on his plate and put kale on his plate and put kale on his plate, and my son tried it and grimaced and we praised him for trying it and pages flew off the calendar and his beard grew down to the floor, and then one day he ate it without comment. And then one day he ate it and said, "This is actually not as bad as I thought!" After which a pair of bluebirds draped around my shoulders the very banner of joy.
The idea is to be more Pollyanna than Baby Jane. We always thank the children graciously for trying, even if their eyes are rolling wildly around like a frightened calf's. We teach them to say, "This might be a little strong for me," rather than "Ugh." We make a big, cheerful fuss about their dislikes ("Wow, you really hate mushrooms!") with the idea of containing them — like, "Hey, it's fine, everyone has one kind of vegetable they won't eat!" We remind them that people change ("Remember how you didn't like poached eggs and then did?"). And finally, we hoot and clap and release the doves when they venture that they might actually like it after all.
Tedious, right? I mean, here's your child who's put everything in her mouth from a dust bunny to a ceramic cat, and now you're stuck cajoling her over a carrot stick. Fret not! There are lots of ways to make vegetables more appealing. I believe that vegetables can be lavished and adorned — by butter and cheese, by garlic and olive oil, by bacon (what better way to get your kids to eat vegetables than meat?). And maybe you're thinking cholesterol and you're worrying fat — but honestly, it will be easier in the end to wean the butter gradually out of the squash than to try to get the squash out of the cupcake, if you know what I mean.
The recipes that follow involve concepts that can be applied more precisely to the vegetable issues of your own family. But they are all delicious. You could sneak some chocolate into them and the kids wouldn't even notice.
