Stealth Pumpkin

If ever I write a book on how to feed vegetables to young children, it will not include any strategies like "Pureed chard is really awesome in brownies! No one will ever know it is there!" It will include only boring strategies, to wit:

1. Cut veggies in small pieces, because it's easier for a kid to try a bite of something that he suspects to be a hunk of demonic gum scraped from Satan's own shoe (in reality: maple-glazed roasted butternut squash) if it is only a little bite.
2. Don't forget to add a little fat and a little salt. This is supposed to taste like food to be enjoyed-- not like penance, not like wallboard.
3. Serve veggies regularly, eat them with unfeigned gusto (and if you can't, then work on your own issues first), and never get into power struggles with kids about what they're eating. Make it appealing, and then detach after you serve it up. If they hate it, that means more for you to enjoy tomorrow at lunch.
4. Repeat for 8 to 10 years. Patience, grasshopper.

So a post on super-secret vegetables is kind of a weird post for me to write, but I am writing it anyway. If you happen to make that pumpkin-tomato soup I posted about last week, and then a few days later you decide to make that macaroni and cheese from the Like Mother, Like Daughter blog, then you might like to know that you can add a cup of pumpkin-tomato soup to the macaroni and the kids will not have the faintest idea. I bumped up the cheese a bit, because I thought they might complain about the weirdness of pumpkin soup in the mac and cheese if they suspected it was there. Kids mostly expect mac and cheese to be the color of a nuclear fireball, so pumpkin fits right in. It was an easy way to slide some veggies into our dinner on a soccer practice night.

Also, if you happen to make a batch of pumpkin-tomato soup in the same week that you make a batch of sunshine soup, you can mix them together after you get tired of eating them individually and wind up with something new and delicious. I served it tonight with grilled cheese sandwiches and my standard carrot-heavy cole slaw. It made for a very orange dinner but it's the right season for serving very orange dinners, wouldn't you say?

The only bummer is that now I'm all out of leftover soup for lunches.