Trickery

I'm not sure how I feel about 'tricking' your children into eating healthy food, a la Jessica Seinfeld's Deceptively Delicious. I suppose there is a time and place for it, especially if you can get them to agree to also eat the obvious vegetables on their plate.

I fully embrace the idea, though, of bulking up the 'healthy-ness' of foods that kids already love - like adding extra veggies to pasta sauce, or using ground turkey or chicken instead of beef - that kind of thing.

I've started making mac n' cheese lately as a good way of cleaning out the fridge. The Girl likes most noodles, and still gobbles it up if I add chopped up broccoli and cauliflower and use whole wheat noodles. See? Healthy(er).

I've just discovered a fun new food blog called Dinner: A Love Story. The author used to write food columns for Cookie magazine and Real Simple, and now she writes this blog about cooking for her family with young children. She had a great post this week about making boxed mac n' cheese a little healthier for her kids - so clever! She uses the boxed cheese sauce mix, but instead puts it over quinoa or quinoa noodles. Never would have occurred to me ...

I was reading something else this week (can't remember where - memory loss is a terrible thing) about the nostalgia you still have as adults for those special childhood foods ... the things you got for special occasions, or birthdays, or babysitter nights. For us, I clearly remember the babysitter food as mac n' cheese from a blue box or McDonald's. Even though I've had a thousand better, healthier, meals since then, I still have a soft spot in my heart for those foods.

I guess the challenge is finding those special foods that your kids love now, and continue to have fond memories of for years to come, while still setting them up for a lifetime of healthy(er) eating. Will the Girl have fond memories of Quack & Cheese? I'm not sure, but I'll give it a shot.