Pureeing Vegetables

This past week I made about 15 bags of vegetable purees.

I am now 'hiding' the purees in our dinners and homemade breads and other foods so that the hubs and I can get our full daily serving of vegetables.

I borrowed the book Deceptively Delicious by Jessica Seinfeld from my lovely mother-in-law and followed her plan on adding the pureed veggies to your food, the best thing about it is that you can't tell it is in there. Seriously, for most of the things I have made the past couple weeks I really have not noticed they were in there at all. Some of the things even tasted better with the veggie puree, or so my husband said.

I have a hard time eating a full serving of vegetables a day. I usually eat a decent amount of vegetables too, but seriously you have to eat so many vegetables, and before I started doing this, I was getting about half my daily allotment.
A-Cakes is kinda picky, she won't eat the vegetable baby food no matter how hard I try. It got to the point where she wouldn't even eat the fruit baby food, which she loves, without me forcing it in her mouth to show her it wasn't veggies. So I started mixing the vegetable baby food in with the fruit. And she ate that stuff right up. So that gave me the idea to put veggies in other foods, especially since she eats more 'big people food' now and not only the baby foods. I wanted to make sure that with the 'big people food' she got veggies too. I started with spaghetti sauce. I made my spaghetti and added pureed zucchini to it. I am pretty picky and I didn't notice it at all, and I added a whole zucchini squash to it. Then I remembered the Deceptively Delicious cookbook that my mother in law had. I had never been too interested in the idea with the pureed veggies until now. But I borrowed the book and it has a lot of great ideas.

For a lot of the recipes in the book, I already have recipes I love, such as spaghetti, but I borrowed the book as a reference to see what kinds of veggies she uses in what meals and then I can use my own recipes, but add veggies to them.

Since I started doing this, I have gotten my 3 cups of daily vegetables in each day. And A-Cakes and the hubs eats it all up.

I don't think the point of adding the vegetables to your food is to hide it from your kids, I still believe you should feed your kids other vegetables that aren't hidden and let them know what they are eating is healthy, but I think this is a great way to get all those vegetables in each day and just make your meals healthier and more nutritious. But if you have an older kid more set in their ways, hiding the vegetables might just be your salvation. I still feed A-Cakes other vegetables like tiny pieces of broccoli and peas that are not hidden and as long as its not baby food she does better at eating it.
But as an adult it makes me feel healthy and I know I am getting more out of my meals.

Follow up post:  How to Puree your veggies