Published: June 20, 2007 10:21 am      

Good Food Without a Fight

Missy Lapine makes meal time easier with ‘The Sneaky Chef’

As author Missy Chase Lapine explains, we all have our cold spinach story. The hour-long standoff at the dining table, with the lumpy green helping in front of our faces, is always a gruesome battle between a parent’s good intentions and a child’s resistance to something that doesn’t look so good.

Lapine, who writes for Gourmet magazine and is a culinary instructor, even admits that she still won’t touch the stuff.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. As a parent, you just have to be a little sneaky.

Lapine is the author of “The Sneaky Chef,” a recipe book with strategies for hiding healthy foods in meals that kids will like. This includes concealing nutritious vegetables in kid-friendly foods like chicken tenders, pizza and mac and cheese.

“This is really a simple solution to a huge problem America faces today,” Lapine said. “It’s a very common theme. Almost everybody has one kid who isn’t a good eater.”

Lapine says that she doesn’t see this book as a substitute for teaching kids the importance of eating right.

“I still teach my kids good nutrition,” Lapine said. “This facilities it, it takes the pressure off.”

She saw the need for this book personally several years ago when her youngest daughter all of a sudden began resisting vegetables. Her oldest, Emily, was nicknamed “Caviar Girl” for her mature food tastes and would eat anything her parents put in front of her plate.

This made Lapine feel ecstatic and lucky. The same was true with Samantha until she turned two and turned her nose up to new foods.

“Here I was publisher of Eating Well magazine, having studied nutrition my whole life, and my daughter ultimately became an extremely picky eater,” Lapine said. “I felt very guilty. I felt a lot of pressure to get her to eat better.”

She knew she had to find a solution. Lapine’s “Aha!” moment came when Emily came down with strep throat a few months later. Emily was almost phobic about taking medicine, so Lapine hid her daughter’s medicine in a bowl of chocolate pudding. She knew she could translate this practice to food itself.

So Lapine began experimenting. She first came up with a list of foods kids are known to gobble up; things like spaghetti and meatballs, chicken tenders, pizza, brownies and cupcakes. Then Lapine listed healthy foods that kids needed and parents could find in an every-day super market; foods like broccoli, frozen peas, fruits and cauliflower. Finally, she worked to marry together elements from the opposing lists.

“It took a lot of trial and error,” Lapine said. “Eventually, it just became really fun and this heavy burden I felt in the kitchen — I dreaded mealtime — became like a game, a really fun time.”

In the book, Lapine incorporates five vegetable purees and utilizes ways of “hiding” them in things like the cheese sauce in store bought Mac and cheese or the meatballs of a spaghetti dish.

There are methods of pureeing and a list of veggies that are easily hidden. Lapine also explains a method for substituting nutritious liquid for water in certain recipes — like using blueberry juice when making Jell-O.

“You can’t believe what you can hide in meatballs, spaghetti sauce, and you can easily hide zucchini and make pizza with it,” Lapine said. “A woman from Maine wrote to me recently and said that she had a better chance than getting a call from Brad Pitt to go on a date than getting her child to eat broccoli. Now she said she’s smiling all the way to the dish washer.”

Lapine says that the recipes are just one tool to what she hopes parents will find in “The Sneaky Chef” — a little peace at the dinner table.

“Life is way too short to fight with our children,” Lapine said.



(Missy Chase Lapine will be available to sign copies of her book at the new Kyle HEB store at 1 p.m. Wednesday, July 11.)