They're Deceptively...Delicious!

I'm a real housewife now: I watched Oprah today.

I was sorting baby clothes while I did so though, so it isn't as if I'd been eating bonbons. I have a lot of baby clothes. Kelli gives me an abundance of hand-me-downs, which is great...but I only have one baby. It seems like Rachel has twice as many clothes than any other baby on the block. And she probably does; she has duplicates of quite a few things since her next oldest cousins are the twins. We haven't had to spend a penny to keep up with her growth spurts.

As I was sorting the clothes and Rachel was napping, I began to get a little bored so I decided to watch TV while I sorted. It was either soap operas or Oprah and I voted for the latter.

Jessica Sienfeld was on talking about her new book, "Deceptively Delicious." Basically they are just recipes where you use vegetable and fruit purees in pretty much everything in order to get your children to eat healthfully. I'm intrigued, but not because I'm worried that Rachel isn't getting her vegetables--I'm more concerned about that on Andrew's part. I think I'm going to start sneaking vegetables into a lot more things.

After all, it really isn't that hard to pull a fast one on Andrew.

I made borscht on Friday night using cubed beets. Beets have this magical way of disappearing when boiled for 24 hours. Andrew hates beets and said he would never eat borscht.

He came home and asked me what kind of soup I was making.

"A yummy soup," I replied.

"What does it have in it?" he asked.

"Yummy things, of course," I said.

He smelled it, "It smells good."

He tasted it, "It tastes good."

He liked it so I decided to reveal my secret, "What if I told you this was borscht?"

"You would have told me a lie," he said, "You said this was a yummy soup. Did you really put beets in here?"

I did--but it was still good soup. I like beets, so naturally I like borscht (and had a fairly easy time eating beets virtually everyday in Russia). Andrew doesn't like beets, but he likes borscht (so maybe he's more fond of beets than he initially thought).

That's not the only place I hide vegetables. My pumpkin-carrot cookies were a hit the year I made them for Christmas (accidentally). They also raisins in them, and applesauce instead of butter. Actually, my family has been cutting butter and sugar levels in our sweets for years by adding applesauce. We're that tricky.

I put carrots in my spaghetti sauce and have gotten very good at slicing vegetables (like onions) so fine that they are impossible to pick out, let alone notice. I even have a handy dandy little vegetable chopper to help me puree things.

Unfortunately for me, Jessica (we're on a first name basis, she and I) already wrote the book on disguising foods as other foods, but I have another idea up my sleeve. One day I might have collected recipes to make a book of my own.