Okay, this might sound crazy (or like something that you’d expect on an old “Seinfeld” episode), but I was so excited to try the recipes in Jessica Seinfeld’s cookbook, “Deceptively Delicious” that I stopped at the store after taking the kids to school and purchased a slew of vegetables. I didn’t have the book with me and I didn’t have a detailed list of ingredients for selected recipes. I thought I’d be okay, though, because fairly early in the cookbook (pp. 28-29) Seinfeld provides a chart of all the vegetables used in the book with instructions on how to steam and puree them (by the way, when you puree the squash or the red pepper, be sure to dry the processor or the purees will be a bit runny). I looked at those pages last night and watched her video on the Oprah website (if you go to that link, just click on “Go in the Seinfeld home” to see the video), so I thought I could remember (generally) which veggies to buy. Well, I knew I already had six zucchini and a bunch of carrots, but I bought more carrots as well as cauliflower, red pepper, spinach, yellow squash and avocados.
I came home and went into pureeing overdrive. I started boiling two pots of water (one slightly later than the other so I could stagger the steaming/pureeing actions), turned on my favorite music and got to work. Before long, I had little baggies of all the above mentioned veggies (with an overabundance of zucchini). Well, as I was deciding whether to put the bags in the freezer or the fridge, I (finally!) realized I needed to figure out which recipes I would make first. I flipped through the book looking for a recipe with “zucchini puree” in the list of ingredients. When I was on page 147 I started to worry just a little. Eventually I discovered that only one of the recipes calls for the zucchini puree — the Oatmeal Raisin Cookies. I guess I’m going to be giving cookies to everyone I see (my kids aren’t fans of oatmeal). Well, that’s not such a bad thing…
A bit deflated at that point, I thought, “Okay, I’m eager to get veggies into my veggie-deficient kids, but I need some kind of tool to cross reference the purees with the recipes.” Well, I love making charts, so I quickly put together a handy dandy little tool. This way, if I happen to end up with a bushel of carrots, I’ll know my options. Here it is:
By the way, some of the recipes use two purees, so I suggest that you check the recipes before shopping — no matter how eager you are to make them!
Also, if you’re interested in finding out more about Jessica and her book, I recommend visiting her website or the Oprah website.
Images from Oprah‘s website (and my word processing software).
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