Eat Your Veggies

After posting on Insta about how #blessed I am to have children who will eat muffins with spinach in them, I was asked to blog about all the ways I am basically a Pinterest Goddess (I kid you not, the first time I wrote that out I wrote Godless and it's a good thing I sorta kinda proofread).

The original post:

"Here's the deal. The dream is that your children like vegetables intrinsically. The reality is that vegetables, like all foods that are not fruits, crackers, or dairy, are very scary to my children. The pediatrician is sympathetic to my plight and suggested I hide the vegetables. My children will not eat any combined foods unless they are mostly chocolate. They will eat these muffins. They aren't even scared of the spinach, especially because I quote Macbeth and use a cackley witch voice."

The recipe:

Chocolate Spinach Muffins

Ingredients:

1.5 c wheat flour

2 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

1 c Greek yogurt

1 c sugar

3 eggs

½ tsp vanilla

1 handful chocolate chips

½ c applesauce or vegetable oil

About 2c spinach but use as much as you can

Cocoa for color (about ⅓ c)

Instructions:

1. Preheat 350
2. Have your children fill the muffin tins with muffin wrappers. Check their work because….they will basically use all the wrappers on the first two muffin holes.
3. Put the applesauce and ½ spinach in the smoothie cup of the blender and blend away! While your children scream because blenders are the devil, add the rest of the spinach and blend.
4. Add all ingredients to bowl
5. Make sure the children witness you throwing in the handful of chocolate chips or else they will not believe you
6. Add cocoa for COLOR--when it looks right, you’re good.
7. Mix while quoting Mackers “Boil boil toil and trouble.”
8. Use a cupcake scoop to fill wrappers ½-⅔ full
9. Bake around 20 mins or until knife comes out clean

NOTE: In the photo I used carrots as well but I have omitted them because my children individually removed each strand and lay them languidly upon the table.

OTHER VEGETABLE HIDING I have tried, along with arbitrary statistics:

Sweet Potato Pancakes:

Stealth check: 2

Success rate: 1/3

The first time I made these, the whole family gobbled them up. The second time I made them I made two mistakes: I put in too much sweet potato and they didn't cook that well, and also the girl caught me putting in "tomatoes" and has refused to eat any pancakes of any kind since.

Zucchini Bread

Stealth check: 0

Success rate: 100%

I don't even have to pretend with these because I told them that the zucchini soaks up the chocolate chip flavor and enhances it. Also just call zucchini bread cake.

Butternut Squash Mac and Cheese:

Stealth check: 20

Success rate: FAIL

They had no idea there were veggies in this...and yet they screamed and cried and refused. It was too cheesy for the husband and I to eat much of and I threw most of it away.

Tomato Sauce

Stealth: meh

Success rate: MEH

At the time, the girl was eating pasta with tomato sauce if the sauce was on the side, had no chunks, and if she could dip her pasta in it like it was ketchup. SO I made scratch sauce with a TON of veggies and blended it in the blender while she wasn't looking because blenders are scary. The starch or whatever in the broccoli made the sauce slightly orange and not RED and she wouldn't eat it. I froze it and we grownups ate it for months. One of the grownups complained.

Brownies!

Stealth: 0 + extra witch cackling

Success rate: MMMM BROWNIES

Same idea as the muffins, but this brownie recipe has you use melted butter, so I just blended in as much spinach as I could and proceeded as normal. Can't taste the good stuff at all.

Have you noticed....none of these are ACTUALLY healthy? I know I didn't love veggies as a kid, and I know MOST little kids think veggies are poison...so...I dunno. I feed them...I try.

They're sensitive. They're not gonna eat:

- smooties (blenders...and scary colors)

- combined foods

- green things

- non-fruit orange things

- mac and cheese for some reason even though it was their main meal for the last two years

- meats...unless shaped like dinosaurs

SO WHATEVER. Maybe they'll grow out of it. Or maybe they'll grow up, get married, and their spouses will hide veggies in their food then, too (I've NEEEVERRR DONE THAT).

At least they're cute.