Sneaky Timmy
OK, I'm the first to admit that though I can, when pressed, get all seven of my kids gathered, shoed and in the car in under ten minutes, the nutritional aspect of their upbringing has gone inadequately addressed. Well, they know what junk food is, thanks to vast and repeated experience, but I don't think that qualifies as adequate education. Actually, I was doing OK for a while, back when Garrett was on his special diet--not only did it help him when he first went on it, but in all the reading I did on food sensitivities and chemical sensitivities and toxins and such I ended up knowing more than any sane person should know. (Half of what I love about watching Monk is listening to the catchy theme song and having this dark chill go down the back of my brain: "This is SO true, so true...") So we did all organic, we made chicken chicken nuggets with chickpea flour, we limited junk food (except for me when I was pregnant and nauseous, or pregnant and tired, or just tired, which is to say, not limited for me at all)--but after five years of never, ever being able to get take out or eat out and not have to make or bring something along for G, when he gradually came off the diet, not only did he love having pizza but I loved being able to ORDER pizza and not have to make anything for him. A couple pregnancies later and dinner, always the bane of my existence for more reasons than there are rear ends in this house that can't stay in their seats, was more often than not a convenience-oriented endeavor. Chicken nuggets, pizza, hot dogs (though the hot dogs are always uncured and nitrate-free, just as the apples are always organic even though I pay as much in toaster pastries as I do in organic produce--hey, I am a mother of contradictions.)
Eventually, though Jake won the battle to get me to not CARE that dinner was not a complicated from-scratch feat each night because, after all, my most guilt-ridden dinner choices were invariably the ones eaten most happily by the most kids, it was only sort of a victory of denial. I still felt the guilt deep down, even as I acknowledged that with this many mouths to get food into, the caloric victory as well as the potential waste of food and financial resources for every meal attempt that was met with rejection was not unimportant. Still, there was guilt.
Enter our beloved Miss Kelly, who mentioned one day that she had been leafing through this cookbook she'd heard about, The Sneaky Chef, and how it was all about sneaking healthy stuff into yummy, familiar foods. I was intrigued, as my guilt popped its head up and told me this might be a thing worth pursuing. (The whole Make Veggies Look Appetizing approach simply doesn't work for kids who don't already like veggies. I have more than one kids' cookbook that shows making cute shapes or even a skeleton out of all different veggies, and I never bothered because really, the kids aren't stupid--cauliflower is cauliflower no matter what part of the body it's pretending to be.)
Anyway, at some point I was out with Cory at the bookstore and I found The Sneaky Chef book and bought it. Cory then drooled over the pictures, and began reading to me the weird ingredients in each recipe...Brownies with spinach, pizza with sweet potato, etc. I warned her not to mention to anyone else that this was healthy food or go over the hidden ingredients in case they decided to reject the foods ahead of time on principle, so of course the next day Richard was found reading the book at the kitchen table and loudly listing all the ingredients. Even so, the pictures and the idea that healthy could be yummy enthralled him, and he was on board with the whole Sneaky Chef adventure (so perhaps I haven't totally neglected their nutritional education, just their nutritional intake.)
Well, it took me a while to get around to the recipes. (I did try one recipe on the fly a couple weeks ago, which called for rolling chicken in Ranch dressing mixed with "white puree" of cauliflower and zucchini, then breading with crushed cereal flakes. However, I didn't have the puree made and didn't remember that it was for skinless cutlets, not skinful drumsticks, so we didn't add in the sneaky healthy stuff or remove the less healthy part, but boy did it taste wonderful!) I had to get the stuff for the purees involved at a time when I knew I would get around to prepping and pureeing all the produce before it went bad, and the end of the school year is not a good time for finding chunks of hours free for spending in the kitchen doing make-ahead stuff. (Neither is the start of the school year, the middle, or any school breaks when the kids are all home.)
But this year I attempted to be ready for the first summer week when the whole crew was home--you know, that week when you sit there at lunch time and realize that no one made their lunches the night before and since they're at home they don't want the usual lunch-box fare and you have only as many chicken nuggets as a 1, 3, and 5-yr-old would eat (which combined is half what Liam would take, and a quarter what Cory would) and the Dora yogurts don't cut it with the school-aged crowd even though to me, strawberry yogurt is strawberry. So I sat down with Richard and did a reality check on what everyone finds palatable for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and which fruits and veggies went over well--this is a constantly changing list, as kids change their very specific tastes with no notice and just when I finally remember which five eat apples and which three eat grapes and that Cory only likes the whipped Yoplait in strawberry or chocolate or the regular Yoplait in banana strawberry but not strawberry, while Richard will take strawberry in any Yoplait variety while Liam does not like strawberry but will take orange creme Whips or vanilla in any brand, one of them switches to Stonyfield black cherry and I'm thrown off for months. Finally, I asked which dinners we should have for the next five days, and he immediately grabbed the sneaky chef book. So fine, Sunday i went on a two-hour shopping trip, making sure I had everything involved for the recipes we chose. Only Sunday night kind of got away from me as I cleaned up in preparation for having them all home (every summer i feel this urge to take the chance to teach them all sorts of things, to read them all a dozen developmentally appropriate books each, read some Bible stories, make them math whizzes before the new school year starts, and bring Garrett's language skills up to normal with much conversation and exercises and activities. To do this, I feel the need to have things ordered and organized the night before. It helps for those first ten minutes, and then the plan pretty much evaporates into an occasional worksheet or book until the following summer.)
So, this brings me to Monday afternoon, when the menu plan stated "Power Pizza" and the recipe called for Orange Puree and White Bean Puree, both of which involved pureeing something I had not yet pureed, and it was 4:30pm. Duncan helpfully fell asleep in his chair sitting at my computer, so his cranky late-afternoon attitude was absent. This left Timmy, who after an extended morning nap was not quite sure what to do with himself at a time when he'd normally be waking up from an afternoon nap he didn't take today. I'd already fed him an adult portion of leftover grilled chicken, so I felt I could manage to prep dinner without undue bother from him.
First step in this whole Sneaky Chef process was to peel the yams so I could boil them and the carrots until soft. This involved finding the vegetable peeler. So while Cory was trying to tell me that she can help if I need her to, I was washing yams and attempting to describe to her what a vegetable peeler looked like and what three places it might be in, and Timmy was figuring out that there was food prep going on and wanted to see what we were hiding from him up on the counters. So, having figured out that there is no way to describe to a 10-yr-old by purely verbal means what a vegetable peeler is, I waddled around looking for it myself with Timmy wrapped around my legs, because once I picked him up I knew I'd never have my hands free until I fed him something. I peeled while Cory cut yams into pieces, I got stuff into the pot and then picked up Timmy and gave him some watermelon. Then I took out the cans of beans to puree, at which point Timmy decided he was done with watermelon and informed me of this fact by the usual method of crawling across the high chair tray--I do usually catch him before he goes over the edge, don't worry. So, Tim was back on the floor while i rinsed the beans, and when I turned my back on the sink to use the food processor he zoomed in on the fact that the doors under the sink were unlatched and immediately took out the box of garbage bags and started checking all eighty bags individually for quality assurance purposes. When i noticed, I realized that as long as the bags were all over the floor and not in his mouth, he was occupied for the two minutes it took me to finish pureeing the beans, measuring out half a cup into a bowl for the pizza sauce, and packing up the rest for freezing except for the mound I dumped in front of a now-plopped-in-high-chair Tim. I then picked up all the bags and put them back in their box and the box back under the sink and the sink back to its latched state, and went to drain the now-soft boiling yams and carrots--right after I swooped Tim off the high chair tray, having downed his pureed beans. I then had to explain to Dunc, Alex and Garrett that they HAD to close the back door when they went out because the mosquitos were set on getting in and Tim was set on getting out. Every time the door opened he made a break for it and howled when it was closed before he got there. But I couldn't take him out, I had to finish this Orange Puree so I could make this pizza...
Timmy was now at the pantry cabinet, mocking the onions, and though I stated for the record that he should not be in there I knew he wouldn't listen and I was OK with that since he'd do little more than throw all the juice boxes and ziploc bags he could get his hands on on the floor in the time it took me to puree the orange veggies. But in the time it took me to dump the veggies from the colander to the processor bowl, he pulled a new move and had the oatmeal canister on the floor, opened and dumped. I noted this, and naturally I let him play with the oats in his lap to keep him happy till the pureeing is done. Of course, he heard the noise of some machine on the counter and correctly guessed that there was foodstuff involved, so back into the chair he went to eat some pureed yams and carrots. I threw some oats on his tray as a fine motor, tactile activity, but it did little to delay his desire for more food or descent from the chair. Since this process was taking a while and he was acting tired, I gave him last night's leftover pasta in case he had to go to bed before dinner was done (because clearly he had not eaten enough yet to qualify as "fed.") I added the Orange puree to the bowl and packed away the rest.
In case you were wondering, when you make Orange Puree, Sneaky Chef Make Ahead Recipe #2, the finished product looks something like this:
At this point, Duncan was asleep, everyone was inside except Garrett, who was out on the hammock refusing to come in but complaining about his mosquito bites, and I was ready to be done with the messy part and just make the darn pizza already, which was really quite simple at this point--mix the puree stuff with the tomato sauce, spread it on some pizza dough, and bake. Timmy was all over me, though, so in my distraction I was unwilling to believe that the refrigerated pizza dough I'd bought was not in the fridge. I'd indulged in the luxury of conversing with the neighbor across the street after my Shoprite run yesterday and a lot of the perishables were put away by Jake and, he now claims, other helpers, so I went through the whole fridge four times before I called Jake to ask him where the heck the pizza dough was. While the guy who doesn't even remember his own birthday or what he said thirty seconds ago swore that he knew for a fact that he handled no such food item yesterday, it occurred to me to open the freezer. Two rolls of pizza dough, sitting there with the labels declaring "Do Not Freeze or Microwave." Jake suddenly had to go and catch a train. So, what now? Order normal pizza and be done? Make pizza bagels out of cinnamon-raisin bagels? Something else entirely?
Well, first I took little Tim, now suddenly and adorably resting his head on my shoulder, and put him to bed with the quick addition of a dry diaper and pacifier and subtraction of all orange-contaminated clothing. Next, I informed the troops of my dilemma, at which point Richard welled up with frustrated tears. Now, having gone through the Orange Puree Process with Chef Timothy, I had little sympathy, and might have said something along the lines of unless we live in a third-world country and this pizza was his only food for the week, I hardly found this grounds for tears so cut it out and go sit on the couch until he gained some perspective. (I haven't yet made it through _Raising Cain_ but if anyone wants to tell me I'm being unfair to my boy-child by telling him not to cry, trust me, I'd have been just as obnoxious to Cory if she resorted to tears in such a situation. And how either gender benefits from having parents indicate the it's OK to cry over such a trivial matter when Mom is the one covered in orange, stray oats and Tim's snot and they are not is beyond me anyway. Perhaps that isn't nurturing, but then, did you see that picture of Tim above? How am I supposed to be nurturing to seven of THOSE?)
So Bot made a valiant and possibly resentful effort to suck it up while I went into the kitchen determined to make this stupid thing work our of sheer stubbornness--if it also pleased the kids, so much the better. I plunked the dough in its packages into a bowl of water and waited fifteen minutes, thinking with some satisfaction that at this rate Jake would not, in fact, come home after dinner was done and cleaned up. I tried one roll, which unrolled halfway but was still frozen in its core, and with Cory now watching I slowly coaxed it to stretch out, plopped some sauce and a hefty dose of cheese on top, and shoved it in the oven. I then added some warm water from the tea kettle to the bowl with the other roll still in it, and began to clean up a few things when it popped open and scared the heck out of me. Stretched that one open as well, dumped on sauce and cheese, got the first one out, and unceremoniously dumped squares of Power Pizza onto plates and called the kids to the table. The kids at least were pleased with the miracle of the frozen dough that came back to life and settled in to eat, except Alex.
"Mom, you make the best pizza in the whole WORLD. But, can i have something ELSE on it?"
"Like what, like parmesan cheese?" This is a frequent request in our house since our friend Mallory introduced us to the heavenly combination of pizza and parm.
"Um, no, not parmajon cheese."
"What, then?"
"Like, maybe something like parma-JON cheese" Cory began giggling at that, and I came out with the cheese and sprinkled it on his slice. "NO! Not that!"
"WHAT do you want on it, then?"
"I don't know."
"Then could you please stop asking me for a topping whose identity neither of us knows and just TRY the PIZZA?"
"Oh, okay, okay, okay!"
Jake walked in then, in time to see me with sauce and puree on my shirt, my face a picture of exasperation, the kids all asking if there's more pizza even as I announced for the third time in thirty seconds that the second pie would be out in five minutes, and Duncan arising from his bed to come claim some pizza, and my husband pulled out of a bag...his empty commuter mug. Then he pulled out of another bag a bottle of Bailey's. When I smiled and told him really, a small bag of M&M's would have sufficed, he produced that as well. I might have to wait thirteen or so years to witness one, but Jake does have his really amazing moments...
Eventually, though Jake won the battle to get me to not CARE that dinner was not a complicated from-scratch feat each night because, after all, my most guilt-ridden dinner choices were invariably the ones eaten most happily by the most kids, it was only sort of a victory of denial. I still felt the guilt deep down, even as I acknowledged that with this many mouths to get food into, the caloric victory as well as the potential waste of food and financial resources for every meal attempt that was met with rejection was not unimportant. Still, there was guilt.
Enter our beloved Miss Kelly, who mentioned one day that she had been leafing through this cookbook she'd heard about, The Sneaky Chef, and how it was all about sneaking healthy stuff into yummy, familiar foods. I was intrigued, as my guilt popped its head up and told me this might be a thing worth pursuing. (The whole Make Veggies Look Appetizing approach simply doesn't work for kids who don't already like veggies. I have more than one kids' cookbook that shows making cute shapes or even a skeleton out of all different veggies, and I never bothered because really, the kids aren't stupid--cauliflower is cauliflower no matter what part of the body it's pretending to be.)
Anyway, at some point I was out with Cory at the bookstore and I found The Sneaky Chef book and bought it. Cory then drooled over the pictures, and began reading to me the weird ingredients in each recipe...Brownies with spinach, pizza with sweet potato, etc. I warned her not to mention to anyone else that this was healthy food or go over the hidden ingredients in case they decided to reject the foods ahead of time on principle, so of course the next day Richard was found reading the book at the kitchen table and loudly listing all the ingredients. Even so, the pictures and the idea that healthy could be yummy enthralled him, and he was on board with the whole Sneaky Chef adventure (so perhaps I haven't totally neglected their nutritional education, just their nutritional intake.)
Well, it took me a while to get around to the recipes. (I did try one recipe on the fly a couple weeks ago, which called for rolling chicken in Ranch dressing mixed with "white puree" of cauliflower and zucchini, then breading with crushed cereal flakes. However, I didn't have the puree made and didn't remember that it was for skinless cutlets, not skinful drumsticks, so we didn't add in the sneaky healthy stuff or remove the less healthy part, but boy did it taste wonderful!) I had to get the stuff for the purees involved at a time when I knew I would get around to prepping and pureeing all the produce before it went bad, and the end of the school year is not a good time for finding chunks of hours free for spending in the kitchen doing make-ahead stuff. (Neither is the start of the school year, the middle, or any school breaks when the kids are all home.)
But this year I attempted to be ready for the first summer week when the whole crew was home--you know, that week when you sit there at lunch time and realize that no one made their lunches the night before and since they're at home they don't want the usual lunch-box fare and you have only as many chicken nuggets as a 1, 3, and 5-yr-old would eat (which combined is half what Liam would take, and a quarter what Cory would) and the Dora yogurts don't cut it with the school-aged crowd even though to me, strawberry yogurt is strawberry. So I sat down with Richard and did a reality check on what everyone finds palatable for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and which fruits and veggies went over well--this is a constantly changing list, as kids change their very specific tastes with no notice and just when I finally remember which five eat apples and which three eat grapes and that Cory only likes the whipped Yoplait in strawberry or chocolate or the regular Yoplait in banana strawberry but not strawberry, while Richard will take strawberry in any Yoplait variety while Liam does not like strawberry but will take orange creme Whips or vanilla in any brand, one of them switches to Stonyfield black cherry and I'm thrown off for months. Finally, I asked which dinners we should have for the next five days, and he immediately grabbed the sneaky chef book. So fine, Sunday i went on a two-hour shopping trip, making sure I had everything involved for the recipes we chose. Only Sunday night kind of got away from me as I cleaned up in preparation for having them all home (every summer i feel this urge to take the chance to teach them all sorts of things, to read them all a dozen developmentally appropriate books each, read some Bible stories, make them math whizzes before the new school year starts, and bring Garrett's language skills up to normal with much conversation and exercises and activities. To do this, I feel the need to have things ordered and organized the night before. It helps for those first ten minutes, and then the plan pretty much evaporates into an occasional worksheet or book until the following summer.)
So, this brings me to Monday afternoon, when the menu plan stated "Power Pizza" and the recipe called for Orange Puree and White Bean Puree, both of which involved pureeing something I had not yet pureed, and it was 4:30pm. Duncan helpfully fell asleep in his chair sitting at my computer, so his cranky late-afternoon attitude was absent. This left Timmy, who after an extended morning nap was not quite sure what to do with himself at a time when he'd normally be waking up from an afternoon nap he didn't take today. I'd already fed him an adult portion of leftover grilled chicken, so I felt I could manage to prep dinner without undue bother from him.
First step in this whole Sneaky Chef process was to peel the yams so I could boil them and the carrots until soft. This involved finding the vegetable peeler. So while Cory was trying to tell me that she can help if I need her to, I was washing yams and attempting to describe to her what a vegetable peeler looked like and what three places it might be in, and Timmy was figuring out that there was food prep going on and wanted to see what we were hiding from him up on the counters. So, having figured out that there is no way to describe to a 10-yr-old by purely verbal means what a vegetable peeler is, I waddled around looking for it myself with Timmy wrapped around my legs, because once I picked him up I knew I'd never have my hands free until I fed him something. I peeled while Cory cut yams into pieces, I got stuff into the pot and then picked up Timmy and gave him some watermelon. Then I took out the cans of beans to puree, at which point Timmy decided he was done with watermelon and informed me of this fact by the usual method of crawling across the high chair tray--I do usually catch him before he goes over the edge, don't worry. So, Tim was back on the floor while i rinsed the beans, and when I turned my back on the sink to use the food processor he zoomed in on the fact that the doors under the sink were unlatched and immediately took out the box of garbage bags and started checking all eighty bags individually for quality assurance purposes. When i noticed, I realized that as long as the bags were all over the floor and not in his mouth, he was occupied for the two minutes it took me to finish pureeing the beans, measuring out half a cup into a bowl for the pizza sauce, and packing up the rest for freezing except for the mound I dumped in front of a now-plopped-in-high-chair Tim. I then picked up all the bags and put them back in their box and the box back under the sink and the sink back to its latched state, and went to drain the now-soft boiling yams and carrots--right after I swooped Tim off the high chair tray, having downed his pureed beans. I then had to explain to Dunc, Alex and Garrett that they HAD to close the back door when they went out because the mosquitos were set on getting in and Tim was set on getting out. Every time the door opened he made a break for it and howled when it was closed before he got there. But I couldn't take him out, I had to finish this Orange Puree so I could make this pizza...
Timmy was now at the pantry cabinet, mocking the onions, and though I stated for the record that he should not be in there I knew he wouldn't listen and I was OK with that since he'd do little more than throw all the juice boxes and ziploc bags he could get his hands on on the floor in the time it took me to puree the orange veggies. But in the time it took me to dump the veggies from the colander to the processor bowl, he pulled a new move and had the oatmeal canister on the floor, opened and dumped. I noted this, and naturally I let him play with the oats in his lap to keep him happy till the pureeing is done. Of course, he heard the noise of some machine on the counter and correctly guessed that there was foodstuff involved, so back into the chair he went to eat some pureed yams and carrots. I threw some oats on his tray as a fine motor, tactile activity, but it did little to delay his desire for more food or descent from the chair. Since this process was taking a while and he was acting tired, I gave him last night's leftover pasta in case he had to go to bed before dinner was done (because clearly he had not eaten enough yet to qualify as "fed.") I added the Orange puree to the bowl and packed away the rest.
In case you were wondering, when you make Orange Puree, Sneaky Chef Make Ahead Recipe #2, the finished product looks something like this:
At this point, Duncan was asleep, everyone was inside except Garrett, who was out on the hammock refusing to come in but complaining about his mosquito bites, and I was ready to be done with the messy part and just make the darn pizza already, which was really quite simple at this point--mix the puree stuff with the tomato sauce, spread it on some pizza dough, and bake. Timmy was all over me, though, so in my distraction I was unwilling to believe that the refrigerated pizza dough I'd bought was not in the fridge. I'd indulged in the luxury of conversing with the neighbor across the street after my Shoprite run yesterday and a lot of the perishables were put away by Jake and, he now claims, other helpers, so I went through the whole fridge four times before I called Jake to ask him where the heck the pizza dough was. While the guy who doesn't even remember his own birthday or what he said thirty seconds ago swore that he knew for a fact that he handled no such food item yesterday, it occurred to me to open the freezer. Two rolls of pizza dough, sitting there with the labels declaring "Do Not Freeze or Microwave." Jake suddenly had to go and catch a train. So, what now? Order normal pizza and be done? Make pizza bagels out of cinnamon-raisin bagels? Something else entirely?
Well, first I took little Tim, now suddenly and adorably resting his head on my shoulder, and put him to bed with the quick addition of a dry diaper and pacifier and subtraction of all orange-contaminated clothing. Next, I informed the troops of my dilemma, at which point Richard welled up with frustrated tears. Now, having gone through the Orange Puree Process with Chef Timothy, I had little sympathy, and might have said something along the lines of unless we live in a third-world country and this pizza was his only food for the week, I hardly found this grounds for tears so cut it out and go sit on the couch until he gained some perspective. (I haven't yet made it through _Raising Cain_ but if anyone wants to tell me I'm being unfair to my boy-child by telling him not to cry, trust me, I'd have been just as obnoxious to Cory if she resorted to tears in such a situation. And how either gender benefits from having parents indicate the it's OK to cry over such a trivial matter when Mom is the one covered in orange, stray oats and Tim's snot and they are not is beyond me anyway. Perhaps that isn't nurturing, but then, did you see that picture of Tim above? How am I supposed to be nurturing to seven of THOSE?)
So Bot made a valiant and possibly resentful effort to suck it up while I went into the kitchen determined to make this stupid thing work our of sheer stubbornness--if it also pleased the kids, so much the better. I plunked the dough in its packages into a bowl of water and waited fifteen minutes, thinking with some satisfaction that at this rate Jake would not, in fact, come home after dinner was done and cleaned up. I tried one roll, which unrolled halfway but was still frozen in its core, and with Cory now watching I slowly coaxed it to stretch out, plopped some sauce and a hefty dose of cheese on top, and shoved it in the oven. I then added some warm water from the tea kettle to the bowl with the other roll still in it, and began to clean up a few things when it popped open and scared the heck out of me. Stretched that one open as well, dumped on sauce and cheese, got the first one out, and unceremoniously dumped squares of Power Pizza onto plates and called the kids to the table. The kids at least were pleased with the miracle of the frozen dough that came back to life and settled in to eat, except Alex.
"Mom, you make the best pizza in the whole WORLD. But, can i have something ELSE on it?"
"Like what, like parmesan cheese?" This is a frequent request in our house since our friend Mallory introduced us to the heavenly combination of pizza and parm.
"Um, no, not parmajon cheese."
"What, then?"
"Like, maybe something like parma-JON cheese" Cory began giggling at that, and I came out with the cheese and sprinkled it on his slice. "NO! Not that!"
"WHAT do you want on it, then?"
"I don't know."
"Then could you please stop asking me for a topping whose identity neither of us knows and just TRY the PIZZA?"
"Oh, okay, okay, okay!"
Jake walked in then, in time to see me with sauce and puree on my shirt, my face a picture of exasperation, the kids all asking if there's more pizza even as I announced for the third time in thirty seconds that the second pie would be out in five minutes, and Duncan arising from his bed to come claim some pizza, and my husband pulled out of a bag...his empty commuter mug. Then he pulled out of another bag a bottle of Bailey's. When I smiled and told him really, a small bag of M&M's would have sufficed, he produced that as well. I might have to wait thirteen or so years to witness one, but Jake does have his really amazing moments...
posted by Sue Freivald at
11:22 PM
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