More Veggies Please! - Easy Kid-Approved Meals and Family-Friendly Comfort Foods with Surprising Veggie Twists by Nikki Dinki
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Web ID: 14738019Great recipes
Great recipes and ideas to try with others. Would highly recommend this for those with children to get them involved with cooking. Or if you like cooking yourself.Great recipes and ideas to try with others. Would highly recommend this for those with children to get them involved with cooking. Or if you like cooking yourself.
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
A great concept, but it just didn't do it for me
I love how the author makes a concerted effort to squeeze as many veggies as possible into recipes that her kids are likely to like, even if the resulting recipe isn't as "healthy" as some may prefer. Sometimes it's more important to lose the battle in order to win the war. Most of the recipes in this book are going to be approachable for most families and kids - there are plenty of sweet treats (cake, brownies, ice cream sandwiches) and kid-friendly meals (tacos, chicken nuggets, spaghetti) that most kids wouldn't really bat an eye at. Dinki does a really good job of make sure that the veggies aren't particularly noticeable in many of the recipes by mixing the right veggies with the right recipes to keep the color and/or taste under wraps. I truly wanted to like this book. I love the premise of the book and all the spirit that the Nikki Dinki has to offer, but the individual recipes just didn't resonate with me. As a child, I was expected to eat whatever the adults were eating, so the idea of some of these recipes is just a bit foreign to me. I'm also in the camp that sees many of these recipes as not healthy enough for little ones or being a bit too involved, but if you're dealing with seriously picky eaters, I definitely think there's a strong audience for these recipes! Just because the book didn't sing to me doesn't mean that it's not a great book! Many thanks to BenBella Books and NetGalley for the egalley.
Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
Wonderful Kid friendly Cookbook!
I think this is a great cookbook. I love all of the ideas to sneak in veggies to regular food for little ones. One of my favorite parts was the section for using Ingredients that you have around the house.
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
Delicious food
The instructions are clear, the ingredients are easy to find at the grocery store, and the recipes are for classic dishes that have been reimagined with veggies. While this says, “kid-approved” and “family-friendly,” the flavors are what your grown-up palate craves. While most recipes can be made without special equipment, if you have a food processor and/or blender you will find yourself reaching for them frequently. With size, weight, and volume given for ingredients (2 medium carrots, 5 ounces, chopped 1 cup), you can’t go wrong. Features like options for what to make with what you have and what holds up well for freezing, these are going to become staples. This cookbook will invite you to question what you think about food. Can an entire container of spinach disappear into chocolate chip muffins? Yes. Is it possible to add carrot juice to biscuits and still taste like the ones grandma used to make? Yes, and they'll turn the beautiful golden color. And yes, a veggie burger can hold up on the grill and pack a bbq flavor punch. Get in the kitchen and be inspired by Nikki’s recipes. You’ll love it.
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
Terrific cookbook
As a mom I’m always looking for ways to add more veggies to my family’s diet. I love that this book isn’t trying to hide the veggies as well as the flavor of a recipe. Who wants boring, sad, flavorless meals? Not all fat is the enemy and Nikki Dinki gets that. So yes there’s cream and parm in the cauliflower Alfredo (spoiler that’s what makes Alfredo taste good. Just cauliflower and salt does not an Alfredo make) there’s also a ton of veggies in all the recipes. While if I’m being honest I’m not quite brave enough to try the veggies in my desserts (yet), the recipes are there for you to try. (They aren’t low fat desserts. They are veggie enhanced desserts). The pictures are beautiful. The recipes are well written and easy to follow. Bonus Nikki provides info on storing and substitutions at the end of each recipe.
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
mo veggies, mo flavor
Nikki Dinki is here to help you feed your family more vegetables. She’s not someone who wants to take away your butter, cream, sugar, or flour. She doesn’t want to take away your meat or your cake or queso. She just wants to show you how you can use veggies to make those not only more nutritious but also more flavorful. For her, it’s not about hiding vegetables into meals so your kids will eat them without realizing it. More Veggies Please! is about using veggies in clever ways, to add moisture, texture, and subtle flavors that will take your family meals to the next level. Dinki was a picky eater as a kid, not interested in vegetables until she was in her 20s. But as a kid not wanting to eat vegetables, her mother made her cook her own meals, so that got her started on this path. As she got older, she found it harder and harder to avoid them. She started with an easy one—tomato, which she liked in her favorite jarred pasta sauce—and moved out from there. And now she’s here for us, helping us all expand our veggie horizons by adding them in new and interesting ways to the dishes we all know and love. She understands that kids aren’t big veggie fans and may need some encouragement, so she uses baby steps. You can move from your regular scrambled eggs to her Cauliflower Scrambled Eggs, which just has a couple of tablespoons of cauliflower rice with the eggs before moving on up to the Cheesy Green Eggs, which includes spinach. For other breakfast ideas, you can try the White Bean Pancakes and Waffles, Pumpkin Pie Granola, or Zucchini Biscuits. Sounds weird, but these recipes are included because they are delicious and have more veggies, not the other way around. Looking for lunch ideas? Try the Souped-Up Broccoli Cheddar, Cauliflower Egg Salad Sandwiches, Chicken Nuggets, or a sandwich with her Strawberry and Chia Jam and Peanut Butter and Hummus Spread. Time for dinner? Go with the Taco Meat with Pinto Beans, Mushroom and Beef Bolognese, Cauliflower and Potato Gnocchi, Eggplant Parm Meatballs, or Sweet Potato Pierogies. Or you could even try her Zucchini Crust Pizza, since she includes all the information you need to bake a pizza in the oven, on the grill, or in a skillet. There are, of course, veggie side dish ideas, like her Creamed Spinach Garlic Bread or Twice-Baked Potatoes. And there are snacks, like her Buffalo Cauliflower Wings, Pea Guacamole, or Parmesan Spinach Crackers. And is it time for dessert? There’s a Brooklyn Blackout Cake, Black Bean Brownies, Sweet Potato Cinnamon Rolls, Peanut Butter Cookies, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream Sandwiches, and Willa’s Lemon Bars. She includes lots of extras throughout, like a list of recipes that are freezer friendly, and recipes that are flagged as her Top Ten (like the Mac and Cheese with Cauliflower and Sweet Potato), Classic (like her Chicken Cauliflower Alfredo), and Remix, which is a new spin on a classic (like her Roasted Garlic, Spinach, and Tomato Grilled Cheese). Plus she includes swaps that can make things easier or hacks that can save time. For example, for her Loaded Queso that includes butternut squash, she has a hack where she explains how you can add the squash to store-bought queso to get the silky texture and flavor bump without spending as much extra time putting it all together. More Veggies Please! is a fresh take on how to incorporate more veggies into the foods we love to eat, and I love that. I love that she uses roasted eggplant to coat her chicken tenders instead of egg, that she thinks about what you can do with an ingredient after you make a recipe (you only used half a can of pumpkin puree—what do you do with the rest?), that she understands life is busy and chaotic and time is precious. I love that she still believes in cheese and chocolate and putting cream and parmesan into an alfredo sauce. And the photos of the food and of her and her family are beautiful and fun and enticing. I do think that the recipes themselves tend toward Italian—not a surprise, she mentions her Italian heritage more than once—and while it certainly doesn’t bother me, a hearty pasta eater, I can see how others might be disappointed by the lack of diversity. But it’s also a family-friendly cookbook, and Italian recipes can be more accessible to kids, so maybe it’s not such a bad thing. So if you are a cook wanting to add more vegetables to your dishes, or wanting to get your picky eater kids (or boyfriend) to be more open to veggies, then the ingenuity of DInki’s recipes will give you some good ideas for new ways to incorporate more veggies in your cooking. I know I’m going to have to try some of these recipes, and I look forward to seeing what clever ideas she comes up with next. Egalleys for More Veggies Please! were provided by BenBella Books through NetGalley, with many thanks.
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
More veggies... YES PLEASE!
Nikki has truly produced one heck of a cookbook! I was lucky enough to be a recipe tester for the last year and I will say, I love the recipes, my toddler loves these recipes, and our family truly appreciates the simplicity of the recipes. There isn't a single mediocre recipe in the book. If you love amazing tasting food, extra veggies in each meal, and kid approved recipes, this is the cookbook for you!
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com
Wonderful Healthy Family Cookbook
More Veggies Please! is a wonderful family cookbook that puts a healthier spin on many classic dishes. I loved the inclusion of (more) vegetables in the recipes. There was beautiful photography throughout which I loved too. A fantastic cookbook for families and children! Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for providing this ARC.
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Customer review from barnesandnoble.com