While I am not a particularly healthly person, I am much more concerned about what my child eats. In our house, there is no need to hide anything in chicken nuggets because chicken nuggets (or any other processed meat for that matter) has ever crossed our doorstep.

Your mention of tasty ways to prepare veggies is so true. I didn’t learn to love veggies until I discovered that they didn’t need to come from a can!

My kid will chow down steamed broccoli dressed with lemon juice, a bit of melted butter and grated parm cheese.

Serve them in tasty ways too instead of just as a limp steamed side dish. I come from a family of Seventh Day Adventist vegetarians and we children always ate our vegetables willingly. One of my favorite foods to this day is brussels sprouts in lemon pepper and butter sauce. Kids will eat most anything with cheese in it so try things like lasagna packed with good things like spinach (fresh - frozen and especially canned are nasty and mushy and children usually won’t like them as texture is important to them) or one of my favorite recipes is to make mac and cheese (we like Annie’s Bunny Shaped because it’s all natural and fun but any brand or homemade recipe works) and mix in peas, corn and steamed baby broccoli and baby carrots to the finished product. I got the idea from my sister who tells her children a charming tale bunnies gathering vegetables on a farm during meal time.

If you don’t give your children vegetables in their intended form, their tastebuds will not mature and they will instead have a taste only for junk food just like all the parents who let their kids eat whatever junk they wanted.

“Conventional processes for producing low fat or fat free cream cheese products suffer from a number of deficiencies. One major deficiency is that these processes generally produce products which fail to approximate the flavor and texture of traditional cream cheese. Moreover, complicated, cumbersome and inefficient apparati are typically employed to accommodate the extensive mixing, shearing and heating steps required in these processes. U.S. Pat. No. 5,079,024, for example, describes a process for manufacturing a fat free cream cheese product which requires an apparatus which includes two homogenizers as well as three separate mixing vessels in sequence. These vessels provide a specific degree of agitation and shear at successive points in the process. Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 5,180,604 describes a process for making a fat free cream cheese in an apparatus which requires only one vessel. The apparatus, however, is severely limited with respect to the amount of product produced per batch. Accordingly, there is a need in the art for an efficient process and apparatus for producing a low fat or fat free cream cheese product which closely resembles traditional cream cheese in flavor and texture.”

Gross. From this website: http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5470593-description.html

But I know plenty of kids who don’t like any vegetables and seriously there is nothing more frustrating than cooking something only to listen to your kids bitch and moan about it.

Sneaking it in and having it as a side dish (without the sugar even) seems like a good solution to me. But not if you’re cooking with fat free cream cheese.