Puree (de papa) for picky palates

One evening when Maria was barely 1, she ran circles around the dining room table holding an asparagus spear.

I was the proudest mother, watching that fat-bottomed, wild-haired, semi-toothless creature enjoying a green vegetable, something that did not easily pass my lips until adulthood. My little child ate well. Beets, black beans, tomatoes, avocados. Not lentils, but who cared, she ate mushrooms and tofu and pasta filled with spinach.

It was the breastfeeding. It was the early exposure. It was her father’s genes. It was fabulous luck.

And then she stopped.

And while not going all modern-mommy crazed and obsessed about it, we have been concerned about her abject refusal for much beyond oatmeal, quesadillas and bug-shaped pasta in cheese sauce. Organic, yes, but asparagus, it ain’t.

So, I bought The Sneaky Chef cook book.

It arrived a few weeks ago and I instantly took to pureeing carrots and sweet potatoes and spinach. I snuck the orange puree in her quesadilla. She figured it out. I made meatballs stuffed with green goodness puree. She turned up her nose.

Had my daughter been born during my peak child-bearing years, my grandmother — my Mama — would have been alive and I would have learned to make puree the Latin grandma way. You see, my grandmother — and countless abuelitas on this planet — have been the sneaky cocinera for generations. Puree de Papa, anyone? There really wasn’t much sneaky about it, actually, as you had no choice about whether you would eat the grayish-brown stuff that came from their blenders.

I lived with my grandparents for a year when I was 8. I was esqueletica, as they said. Skeletal. All pall, no pink. Within a few short weeks I was all gordita and glowey. My grandmother sat me at the kitchen counter while she threw meat, rice, papas, malanga, and who knows what else, into her blender, and when it was all whipped up, she stuffed me like a Christmas goose. There are stretch marks on my hips as evidence of that year.

If you read this blog with regularity, you probably know I think about my grandmother, whose name was Evelina, a lot. Motherhood prompts me to think back about how she did what she did — seven kids and constant mopping. And when I flip through the Sneaky Chef during meal planning, I can’t help but think of her and laugh. This is nothing new. Women have long figured out ways to sneak nutrition onto picky palates. My grandmother did it. The difference is, she didn’t need a cookbook and she didn’t need to sneak it. I knew when that spoon came at me, I’d better open my mouth.

Around here, we’ll likely continue to sneak. I like the recipes and my kid does not believe she has to open her mouth when I ask her to (she also doesn’t close it when I ask her to) and the spoon-as-airplane stopped working long ago. So, tonight she gets some bug-shaped pasta with orange-colored puree.

Now, I just have to convince my husband that the brownies I sneak are good for me. Yeah really, they’ve been fortified with purple puree. Yeah, honey, seriously.

(Do you have an abuelita puree recipe? Share, por favor…)