Oh Man, This Is Kickin'!

If you have children or finicky friends and family that refuse to make good, healthy choices at meals, or who won't eat something if they can tell what is in it, then allow me to introduce you to this cookbook. Authored by Jerry Seinfeld's wife, she has more or less conned her family into eating healthily by disguising vegetables. They've gone "incognito," if you will.

I made the Pasta With Bolognese Sauce tonight. The masked marauder in this sauce was sweet potatoes. Yes, I really said sweet potatoes. The other recipes include veggies such as spinach, cauliflower, yellow squash, butternut squash, and avocados. There are recipes to cover any meal of the day, and even great tips on how to make mealtime be a way to connect with every member of the family and not be wanting to hit the bottle when it's all said and done!

I will admit that these recipes do take some advance prep. The hidden veggies are prepared and pureed ahead of time so that they can go undetected by even the crankiest toddler or skeptical adult. If you don't have a blender with food processor options, she's got ideas for how to process the veggies. Once you do this, however, you pop these suckers into the freezer (most recipes call for 1/2 c. amounts, so I froze them in 1/2 c. portions in quart-sized freezer bags so they froze flat like pancakes and take up almost no space in the freezer) and they are good for months. When you're ready to use them, cut a hole in one corner of the bag and squeeze it out pastry bag-style and you're ready to rock. Once you've got the veggies prepared, these recipes don't take any longer than most recipes. For example, once I started cooking the sauce, the entire thing only took about 45 minutes. Not bad for a spaghetti sauce made from scratch!

Now for the taste test: the kids scarfed it down as if they'd only been fed saltine crackers and water all day. I myself was a bit skeptical. I just couldn't imagine sweet potatoes tasting good with parmesan cheese, italian spices, and ground meat. But let me tell you, it's the best sauce to ever come out of my kitchen. This isn't the kind of Bolognese you're gonna get in Italy or that foul restaurant called The Olive Garden. This is a hearty, healthy, family kitchen kind of sauce, great on cold winter's days. **BTW, did I mention that I made a double batch? I kept a container of it for leftovers tomorrow and froze the rest in 2 c. portions. I ended up freezing 10 c. of sauce! That's five meals taken care of! Now that's what I'm talkin' about!