Puree Mania & Forts Made Easy

One of my very favorite Christmas gifts was the "Deceptively Delicious" cookbook by Jessica Seinfeld. She teaches you how to sneak veggies into recipes so that your kids will be fooled into healthy eating! I LOVE IT! Basically you just cook the veggies and puree them to the consistency of baby food and then add them to your recipes. She even has tons of dessert recipes too! So, I've been going a little "puree happy" lately. I want to have a big stock in the freezer, so we've had puree mania at our house. Here's a photo of what we've made: there are peas, broccoli, spinach, sweet potatoes, carrots, butternut squash, zucchini, cauliflower, and beets. I also use canned pumpkin for a few recipes. And I must admit that this is helping Bryan and ME to eat our veggies too!

Also, any parent will understand how much kids love forts (and any non-parent will remember how much he or she loved forts as a kid!), but they are kind of a pain to make....building the walls, re-building the walls after they've all fallen over, getting the blanket just right, doing it all again when you try to crawl inside and you bump a wall...etc. Anyway, yesterday I discovered a really easy fort that my kids thought was great. (I'm lucky that they're still little enough to think this fort is great; any older kid would probably realize how lame it really is.) Just have them lay on the couch and then drap the blanket over the back of the couch, then down at an angle and tuck it under the couch cushion. It's more of a tent, really, but like I said, my kids loved it and I wasn't about to argue with that!