To get your kids to eat healthy, get a little sneaky

It's a fight as old as time: getting your kids to eat right. Although honesty is usually the best policy, sometimes deceiving your kids into eating healthy is the way to go. As we discovered through Jessica Seinfeld's new cookbook, "Deceptively Delicious" -- all it takes is a little sneaking around.

And magically, an orange and green concoction becomes chocolate brownies; an orangey goo turns into your run-of-the-mill macaroni and cheese with an added addition of a cauliflower puree.

Who knew sneaking vegetables into recipes is just one way moms and chefs around the country get kids to get right?

It seemed like a novel idea to a few of us at CBS 6, so in the interest of a good laugh and to see if sneaking around really works, we assembled a pseudo-cooking crew to whip up four very common recipes: macaroni and cheese, chicken nuggets, brownies and chocolate chip cookies. Each recipe is made with a hidden vegetable puree.

It took our crew two hours, but eventually healthy eating was born. The end result: mac and cheese well-equipped with a cauliflower puree, brownies with carrots and spinach, chicken nuggets with broccoli and spinach and cookies made with oatmeal and chick peas, nestled safely inside.

The real test, though, came in seeing if the kids buy it. Would they know they were really doing double duty every time they took a bite of those nuggets or that mac and cheese?

The only way to find out was to hold our very own taste test.

The kids wasted no time digging right in and they seemed to enjoy the food right away. Most children ate their brownie first, but many liked the mac and cheese and the chicken nuggets.

But very few kids enjoyed the chocolate chip cookies, and some felt the brownies had a different consistency than they were used to.

For the most part, though, it seemed we had done the impossible and pulled one over on them. Once we told them about the special ingredients, many said they would have never eaten the food. 

On the flipside, their parents were also impressed by this new cooking tactic.

One parent tells CBS 6, "I tried the mac and cheese because my kids were eating it and it was fine. Cauliflower normally has a pretty strong flavor to is, and I didn't even taste it."

Another believes this will help in her ability to feed her family a nutritious meal: "I like the idea of adding vegetables because I'm not a great cook so we always do steamed vegetables. If I can find another way to work it in it would benefit the entire family."

Experts suggest if you do sneak vegetable purees into your family's food, make sure to also prepare fresh vegetables to go with your meal. That way, the kids always see the vegetables with dinner, even if they don't actually eat them.

For a list of the recipes click here.