Deceptively Delicious - Jessica Seinfeld [3]
Sascha
SASCHA, our oldest, is six years old, and she is my toughest taster. In fact, she is practically impossible to please. From birth, it seems, she has been decisively clear about what she will and won’t eat. She takes a hesitant and apprehensive approach to food and rarely will try anything new. Sweets are the exception, however, and she will try anything that even remotely looks like dessert.
Julian
JULIAN, our middle child, is four years old. He’s a good eater if his older sister isn’t around to influence him. On his own, he’s happy to eat what is presented to him, but when he’s with Sascha, he falls prey to whatever she dictates. So all of a sudden, even when I’ve cooked food I know he likes, he’s pushing his plate away and saying, “I don’t like it.” And now I’ve got not one, but two kids who aren’t eating, and with whom I would have spent the rest of the meal negotiating.
Shepherd
SHEPHERD, our “baby,” is two years old, and he is a remarkable eater. He will eat anything. ANYTHING. He will eat himself sick. The first word he spoke was “that,” which was baby talk for “I want THAT food, there, on your plate.”
Jerry
My husband, JERRY, is a great eater. He’s quite happy to eat vegetables and any healthy food I make, for that matter. In fact, he’ll pretty much go along with whatever’s happening, which is one of the many things that make him such a great husband. And he’s a marvelous taster because, unlike the kids, he’ll say things other than, “Ew, gross, this is disgusting.”
THE PROGRAM
Getting organized will make your life much easier. Follow these four steps to healthful family meals.
1. Equip your kitchen with tools that make cooking easier.
2. Stock your kitchen with staple ingredients that you will use again and again.
3. Make purees, a few at a time, and then portion and freeze them for use in the recipes.
4. The recipes. The deception begins!
If you’ve read this far, you’re ready for action. So here’s my plan.
To encourage your family to eat better, you’ll need to make a few changes in the way you cook. The first step is to put together a number of simple fruit and vegetable purees. You will quickly and easily learn to prepare, cook, puree, and portion the purees. Then the purees will be available to use when they’re called for, just like any other ingredient in my recipes.
I learned from changing my own cooking habits that I needed to recalibrate my brain—I needed a systematic approach to organize myself. And I’m going to show you my system so that you can set things up in your own home to make cooking as efficient as possible.
Theoretically, you can make a puree as you need it, that is, just before you make the recipe in which it’s used. I can tell you, though, that it doesn’t work that way in my house. If I can reach into my freezer and grab a portion of butternut squash, my kids will be eating mac and cheese twenty minutes later, whether I’ve added the squash to my own recipe or to a packaged mix. If the squash isn’t there, it’s back to “Eat your vegetables” for me.
Think of me as your kitchen trainer. I want to encourage you to spend about an hour each week preparing the purees so that you’ll always have them on hand. You certainly won’t want to do it every week (how much do you really want to go to the gym?) but you’ll find that it’s worth it. As change begins to happen, you’ll hardly notice the extra 2–5 minutes it takes to puree, and you’ll increasingly find nooks of time to do it. Pureeing will become a habit, like anything else.
1
EQUIP YOUR KITCHEN
There are a few pieces of special equipment that will help you to become an efficient and accomplished chef de puree.
It’s useful to have both a large piece of equipment (such as a standard-sized food processor or blender) and a smaller one (such as a mini food processor or Magic Bullet); the food processor is best for making