Brownies & Beans

Have you ever read those mommy magazines about sneaking healthy food into children through such trickery as pureeing veggies in spaghetti or putting spinach in smoothies? Or heard anything like the high school teacher I had who once made brownies…completely out of beans.

Gross.

I haven’t gone so far and luckily, Ada (daughter #1) actually loves veggies, more so than her father and I.  She lived off sweet peas for months, then moved to sauteed peppers and mushrooms, with broccoli now being her vegetable of choice.  I will take no credit for any of this, other than I did try to make sure that she had vegetables as her first food, before introducing her to fruit.  I am fairly certain however, her first food was actually chocolate, courtesy of her grandma…why grandmas insist on shoving my children full of sugar is beyond me.

Regardless of Ada’s love of green vegetables, I know it can be a struggle to provide balanced, healthy meals for our families.  I think we all aspire to be masterful mommas who can fool small children into thinking beans are brownies, and I am now searching for any mom tricks out there.  So far, I have two healthful eating tips that I always use. Prepare to be impressed:

1)  Dump frozen sweet peas into the macaroni noodles ( I use organic, whole-wheat, thankyouverymuch) as they boil. Drain and prepare as usual.  The girls gobble them up without ever knowing.

2) This one is a bit more fanciful.  I hide flax seed in everything that I bake.  Make sure to buy the ground flax seed, as apparently, the whole stuff is not as beneficial.  I dump a generous amount into pancake and waffle batter, chocolate chip cookies, coffee cake.  Perhaps I need to lay off the baked goods a bit to really be healthy, instead of hiding flax seed in chocolate. Hmmm….But anyways, you can’t even taste it. And according to WebMd, flax seed really is a supermom food.

Now I know macaroni and cheese and flax seed does not exactly constitute healthy eating, so any tips would be much appreciated! Especially now that I have child number two, who is showing a massive sweet tooth already.  She had fruit (darn pears) before she had veggies, I think we may be on to something here…

And if anyone has a recipe for bean brownies, do share.