A book written by an American housewife who never (1) learnt to cook or eat well, with (2) obsolete and WRONG nutritional advice, (3) weird proportions and (4) totally useless from the point of getting your kids to eat vegetables.
1. The author admits they never go out to restaurants. Probably never tried anything better than diner food. What she cooks for her family is even less inspiring than school cafeteria. I was hoping to find some good recipes that would incorporate pureed vegetables well, but there is nothing I would feed to my family who know better than chicken nuggets, burgers and cheese sticks.
2. Almost every recipe calls for low fat this or low fat that. The author states that you have to use "low fat or nonfat dairy" which is an old advice dating back to the 1960-ies, disproved by recent scientific research. (Full fat dairy is now recommended for children and adults). She also uses flavored yogurts (sugar!!!) and margarine spread!!! (horror!)
3. Even just by looking at some recipes I can see the proportions are off.
4. The amount of vegetable puree in each recipe is so miniscule, it’s negligible from nutritional point of view. ½ cup of vegetable puree per dish for 4 people means that each person will get 1/8 cup of vegetable. That’s one tiny floret of cauliflower or a teaspoon of peas. If, according to the author, a person has to eat 1.5 to 2.5 cups of vegetables per day, your child will have to consume about 16 full servings (say, of mac-n-cheese) a day. )))) Good luck.
Also, most of the nutritional value in vegetables comes from vitamins. Some recipes call for 3-4-5 hours of cooking (stewing), which would totally destroy any good stuff that originally was in that ½ cup of (already cooked) broccoli puree to start with.
Overall, the concept of adding vegetable purees to your dishes is great, and the idea of freezing and storing puree in small jars is good. I would go for 1-1.5 cups of puree in dishes like pasta sauces.
Otherwise the book is useless and in many cases just bad obsolete advice.
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