THE ART OF DECEPTION

James used to be SUCH a good eater. He would eat anything. He finished everything. And then he turned 16-months-old... and his independence skyrocketed.

For the past 2 weeks it has been impossible to get James to eat his vegetables. And the few weeks before that, the only way we could get him to do so was to give him a bowl of crushed ice to feed himself and play with while we fed him (the grandparents remember those weeks fondly, I'm sure). But even that won't work anymore. Why? Because James now flat-out refuses to be fed. He MUST feed himself. And he won't feed himself veggies because 1) he's not very good with a spoon yet and 2) he won't yet eat non-pureed veggies (of any variety). So we finally broke out our cookbook "Deceptively Delicious" by Jessica Seinfield (thanks for the recommendation Karyn).

We had purchased it back when we couldn't get James to eat his green veggies, back when he was still a teeny, tiny 7-month-old. And back then we didn't really need the book - all we had to do was hide the green veggies in the orange veggies. That sneaky trick worked well for about 9 months...

The first recipe we tried was the grilled cheese:
Looks just like a regular ol' grilled cheese sandwich, right? Well, the secret ingredient is pureed sweet potato (or butternut squash, but we went with the potato tonight - we have plenty of both stocked in the chest freezer). I taste-tested it first, of course (I don't feed James anything that I wouldn't be willing to eat myself), and it was GOOD! And James agreed:
He finished that entire sandwich in about 3.5 minutes. Hooray for deception!