Vegetables in those dishes are ingredients, not hidden. It’s a pretty cruddy curry that has no vegetables in it.
The simple point is that the trying to hide them is the issue. The goal isn’t any huge need to get kale or broccoli in the kids gullet today; it’s helping them gradually learn that vegetables are not something to be avoided and that have to be hidden. That there are plenty of them that simply taste good. Creating future adult people who do not feel that they have to pinch their nose and force eating vegetables but who like you have a wide variety they enjoy eating and maybe even cooking in new ways.
Yes and no. I made pasta sauce yesterday, and added chopped cauliflower only for health reasons and not because I normally do or because it is part of my recipe (which usually uses mirepoix). Sure, meals contain ingredients, but not all are added for flavour or tradition.
But I agree in general children should be taught to enjoy vegetables as they are. I just don’t think that’s the only way.
I added cauliflower, which adds little to the taste but something to the nutrition, to the celery, carrots and onion that is part of the traditional recipe. If I did not want to include more brassicae in my diet I would have happily skipped it.
Honestly it seems to me like your mindset here is the same as @Spice_Weasel and kale: you think you are supposed to eat it so you try to come up with ways to eat something you don’t like.
Is the sauce you made with slightly less carrots, celery, and onion, and a wee bit of cauliflower, any healthier than the original recipe? I highly doubt it.
Sure though, it is fine to modify recipes to include healthier ingredients, and I don’t think that is what is being talked about when the subject is hiding vegetables so their kids eat them.
I have a host of yummy recipes and preparations that feature cauliflower and other cruciferous vegetables, and I think they are a great part of a varied diet, but there’s really no need to try to trick yourself (or a child) into eating them.
FWIW (calling back to an old cooking show) sometimes just use the damn schmaltz.
Guess what? Your way doesn’t work for all kids at all ages. Putting extra nutrition in their food in the form of vegetables they don’t see, during the years they refuse to eat a visible vegetable, isn’t the end of the world. No one’s saying to keep it up forever.
Eh, not every vegetable always needs to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral, as the saying is. Sometimes it’s fine to include a vegetable for minimally tasteable fiber bulk and nutrition, rather than because you want that vegetable “featured” in the dish.
I’m certainly not saying it’s the end of the world.
I am expressing a different mindset and goal to childhood eating habits than many parents have, one that I believe is associated with healthier habits over the long run than is associated with the needless anxiety many parents have that they have to find a way some way to get cauliflower or broccoli into their kids.
In my way of thinking dinner at least is a family meal as often as possible and there is no “their food” as opposed to the well balanced dinner of real food (not ultraprocesseed crap) made for the entire family. Other than the occasional treat there is only a variety of healthy real food options on the table and available. When old enough the kids are involved in the cooking.
The sneaking vegetables in is mostly done in service of parental anxieties and that anxiety leaks through more often than not.
I buy it for recipes where it tastes fine, but it’s always too much for the recipe and I never use it up in time.
I don’t actively dislike it, it’s just firmly on my list of mediocre foods.
I cook with a lot of different vegetables. Some I like better than others. I’m mightily fond of cabbage. And I like peas because they are wrinkly. I get a kick out of wrinkles for some reason.
I never really ate many vegetables until I became an adult and started trying them out. Growing up it was mostly potatoes and carrots and maybe a cucumber. My diet is significantly more varied than when I was a kid, both in terms of what I was served and what I chose to eat.
The only thing wrong with kale is that it is bitter and tough and tastes nasty. There’s a whole family of delicious vegetables, and somehow the only member that is really unpleasant to eat got popular. I LIKE broccoli and cauliflower and cabbage and brussel sprouts.
I agree that spinach and chard taste better. And i suspect they are nutritionally similar.
Weirdly, my daughter who refused to eat any vegetable discovered that she like small amounts of frozen peas, eaten frozen as a snack. I guess they were kind of sweet and didn’t taste like cooked peas.
Yeah, I tend to distrust all hard-and-fast boundaries between “this is the right way to parent” and “all these other ways are the wrong way to parent”. DSeid’s right that parents should try to let go of anxiety about children’s food needs, but there’s no one right way to feed children healthily.
When we were young kids my mom literally had a repertoire of exactly seven different dinners that she served in strict rotation. Tuna casserole on Tuesday, hamburger casserole on Wednesday (unless it was the other way around), spaghetti and meatballs on Saturday, roast beef on Sunday, and I can’t remember the others. We all grew up learning to like all sorts of different foods anyway.
I’ve been served kale chips. They taste like kale. I’ll pass, thanks.
I honestly don’t understand why people eat kale. It must taste different to some people than it does to me.
I admit that i don’t really like vegetables that much. I do mostly eat veggies because they are supposed to be good for me. I’d be happy with fruit and meat and milk and nuts, and maybe a little bread and oatmeal from time to time. But there are lots of vegetables that taste okay.
I’ve heard people complain it tastes like dirt. I find it’s a good addition to extra vegetable fried rice (chopped up in teeny bits), and I used to have a good recipe with chicken sausage, and I think I’ve got a chicken artichoke soup recipe with kale, but beyond those specific uses I find it difficult to muster much enthusiasm.
Too bad it’s so expensive! I remember thinking it was expensive back when they were $1 ea. Now it’s several bucks ea for what’s essentially a few bites.