Healthy Meals Kids Will LOVE

If your kids are anything like mine then you've got some pretty picky eaters on your hands. So frustrating sometimes. I try so hard to make nice healthy meals for my family only to find out it was all in vain. Oliver has been especially hard. His diet consists of about 5 things and thats IT. He won't even try anything new. Even stuff that most kids love. We feed them their vitamins daily, but I still can't help but worry about his health, mostly long term I guess. He LOOKS healthy but I just hope he's getting the nutrients he needs for his brain and other organs to develop properly.

So I've finally decided to try the "sneaking" it in method. I'm sure most of you have heard of the cook books Deceptively Delicious and The Sneaky Chef. I looked into both books, read reviews and decided to go with the Deceptively Delicious book (although the reviews were leaning more towards The Sneaky Chef). The thing that sold me on DD was the fact that it had pictures. I'm a pretty visual person so when I read that the SC didn't have pictures but the food tastes better, I still chose DD... simply because it has pictures... Is that a good enough reason?

So basically the whole idea is to add pureed vegetables in where ever possible. I've been pleasantly surprised that it's been WORKING!!! We started by pureeing a bunch of veggies and storing them in the freezer. The cook book says to steam them before blending, but I just blend them up raw in the Vitamix wich helps preserve the nutrients a little.

We've got carrots, sweet potatoes, cauliflower, spinach, broccoli, and white beans.

We started with the French Toast but I changed it up a bit to make it even healthier.

Instead of regular milk I used the new Silk Pure Coconut (we LOVE this stuff, and coconut milk is extremely healthy), and I added flaxseed to it as well. I watched with with biggest smile on my face as Oliver ate up his breakfast. Not only did he eat it, but he LOVED it. I made a bunch and froze the extras to make for a quick breakfast later that week.

Look at it! You can't even tell that there are carrots cooked onto it!

So far I've made chocolate chip cookies using white beans instead of butter or oil. Chicken nuggets dipped in spinach before coating them in whole wheat bread crumbs and flaxseed then frying them up using coconut oil. We made scrambled eggs that had cauliflower mixed in. Then, one day I came up with my own idea and added freshly pureed sweet potatoes into their mac & cheese. We buy the Annie's brand (it's organic) and I just stirred in the sweet potatoes along with the butter and my kids actually ate it!!! The sweet potatoes hadn't even been cooked which we all know is the best way to consume produce. So I was pretty proud of that one :)

I know what you're thinking... Well sounds great, but who has the time for this? The key is to spend a day pureeing veggies so you have all kinds on hand when you're ready to make something. Then when you do make something, then double or triple the recipe so you can freeze the extras for quick and easy meals in the future.

One of my favorite quotes my husband always recites is:

"Do what is hard and your life will be easy, do what is easy and your life will be hard"

-Les Brown