Sneaky Chef: You Can Be One Too!

For Christmas, Santa delivered the Sneaky Chef cookbook. I am by FAR no chef, so I pretty much stink at winging any kind of cooking. I was excited to find this book, & a very similar one by a celebrity wife which I shall not name. Why did I choose Sneaky Chef over the other same-but-different cookbook? One, this author (Missy Chase Lapine) is not a foofy celebrity’s wife. I feel like I can relate to her…she’s a regular old Mom who wanted to prepare more healthy food for her children. Period. That was her motivation for her recipes, & after time she set out to assemble the recipes into a cookbook. I like that pipe dream sort of woman. And two, after reading lots & lots of reviews of both books before I sent Santa a link for which one I wanted, I found out that Sneaky Chef‘s recipes turned out better tasting (on average) than the other book. I set out Wednesday morning to stock up on all my ingredients for the “purees” which you sneak into all sorts of food. I began with the Orange Puree, Blueberry Juice, & Green Puree ingredients: After I had cooked, pureed, & measured out more purees & juices than I can even count, I started thinking about what I could cook that day with my new ingredients! After Reese woke up from his nap, he asked for cookies. Quick flip through Sneaky Chef and sure enough…there’s two recipes for chocolate chip cookies! We chose the Health-By-Chocolate cookies (which include the sneaky ingredients of spinach, blueberries, wheat germ, whole wheat flour, & lots of cocoa powder) & were SO amazed at how they turned out. I wasn’t sure…I mean…spinach in cookies? I was sure Reese would taste that “something was different.” I didn’t have any chocolate chips, but I did have semi-sweet baking squares. Same stuff, different shape. Reese had to take a taste of his own baking square just to make sure… Yep! Same stuff! It’s a good thing my knives aren’t super sharp. See that little flap of skin on the end of my thumb? That’s from trying to chop the chocolate & putting my fat thumb in the way. If the knife were super sharp, I would have sliced the end of my thumb off…then you’d never know how much I love the Sneaky Chef cookbook! So what was the end result? The Spinach/Blueberry/Wheat Germ/Whole Wheat cookies rocked! The real name is Health-By-Chocolate cookies & you would never, in a bazillion years, guess they had spinach or blueberries. The wheat germ gives them a slightly more “whole” texture, but nothing that my son (or my neighbor’s sons who I pawned some of them off on) batted an eye at. The texture is a bit more crumbly than a regular cookie too. But her suggestion of making them into bite-sized cookies made that not an issue!