Apple Pumpkin Pancakes & The Sneaky Chef

I think it’s safe to say that one thing all parents struggle with is meal time. At some point, in some way, serving our kids food can present issues. Each household experiences struggles that are as unique as the people that live there. Some hardly struggle at all, while other homes experience WW3 at every meal and snack. If I were to write down all the different reasons kids avoid some foods, I’d be writing for the rest of my life and after. 😂 For our house, the struggles all boil down to one thing: Neurodiversity. My kids are all foodies. The oldest devours most everything except potatoes and chicken. Good heavens don’t give him potatoes and chicken. Except occasionally French fries. 🤦🏼‍♀️ Oh wait! Chicken nuggets. He’ll gladly dive into a plate of those with BBQ sauce and ketchup. Any other forms those foods might take is a big fat NO! Which is super strange considering his dad and I could totally live off of potatoes. 😂

The middle child, she will literally eat anything and then steal more off the plate next to her if your not eating fast enough. 😅 However, if you put something new in front of her, she will be so disturbed by this high level of strangeness that she will barely be able to stay at the table. Sometimes she can’t! Sometimes she needs to step away for a second.

The baby of the family is a huge carnivore. That girl will eat enough BBQ and steak to put a grown man to shame. 😂. Spicy? Yes. Smoked, marinated, dry rub? Yes, yes and yes! Chicken, pork, beef, venison, duck, squirrel; she doesn’t care! She’s gonna eat it. Put a bowl of dessert down in front of her though and she’s gonna walk away. Sweets are just not for her. Unless it’s an occasional chocolate chip cookie or her grandmas blueberry muffins!

What do they all have in common? They all get overstimulated from an assortment of neurodivergent qualities. They experience these differently and at different intensities, but the more we learn about each of them, the better off we are at getting them to eat a wider variety of food.

For each of our kids, it is truly less of a flavor thing and more of a “feeling”. For Bubs, the texture of cooked potatoes is just wrong. That’s why French fries can be okay if they’re crunchy, but baked, mashed or boiled potatoes are just not gonna happen. I’ve got to hand it to him! He’s tried so many different ways to eat them and has put up with my coaxing for years, but potatoes are just not going to be something you see on his plate.

For EJ, site and consistency are important. Colors guide her in every aspect of her life. She prefers quiet environments but loud colors! Coloring is how she expresses her thoughts and feelings. It is how she portrays her inner dialogue and how she finds enrichment. She loves every color and prefers the brightest and loudest. If the color of her food is wrong, she’s gonna balk at it. She also relies heavily on routine and when anything throws a kink in that, she panics. This carries over into her food. As she grows older, she is learning to come back to the table after stepping away and at least eat the food around the new food. She’s also growing quicker at trying the new foods, so long as I give her space to work it all out herself.

Baby Wren has a whole different thing going for her. While she’s still young enough to lack the communication skills to give me a clear insight, I can gather that she doesn’t like the way sweet things feel in her mouth. Or the way they make her teeth feel. I’ve seen her eat a sweet she really loves, then turn around and go brush her teeth. I don’t like the way sugar feels on my teeth either, so I’m not sure if that is her struggle or if she will give me a different insight as she grows.

No matter how your kid struggles, it’s so important to make sure they’re getting the proper nutrition to help those little bodies grow. This mission is what lead me to discovering the Sneaky Chef!

When EJ was young and not able to communicate well, it was so difficult to get her to eat at all! Of course, that was before we learned she couldn’t hear (we were able to get that fixed when she was about 2.5yrs) and before we knew she was autistic. Every meal was a struggle. Finally after a lot of trial and error, I was able to pin point a small group of food she would eat consistently. I could get her to eat at every meal that way, but it was not a very well rounded diet and I knew she was missing key nutrients. Late nights reading on how to help her, finally brought me to Missy Chase Lapine. This book is absolute genius! She uses a well crafted series of purées to hide tons of fruits and veggies in recipes loved by all kids! Then, she teaches you how to use them in all of your cooking! Learning to hide powerful nutrition in EJ’s favorite dishes allowed me to ensure she was getting proper nutrition while we worked on the new foods thing. Then I realized I could be doing this for my whole family! My husband is a super picky eater as well. Truly just a meat and potatoes kind of guy. Which, we now know, is also autism and he has grown in his ability to identify his triggers and what bothers him about certain foods. Meat and potatoes are consistent and reliable. New foods are a host of suspicious textures, smells and flavors. However, by applying the sneaky chef techniques, I can successfully ensure every member of our family gets all of they’re daily fruit and veggies without them having to fight against their own bodies and minds. It’s perfect! Bubs has recently grown fascinated by this sorcery and will ask me what I’m hiding in whatever meal I’m prepping. At first, I was afraid to tell him. What if he puts up a mental block and won’t eat it anymore? While that’s definitely something some kids would do, I was lucky with Bubs, who chose to be excited by this new trick. “Daddy! I ate chick peas, corn and beans in my pizza today!” 😂

My husband was the reluctant one; dodging foods he knew I had tampered with. The amazing thing with these recipes though is that you cannot taste them! She has carefully crafted theses to fit right into the recipe your using. Once I got the hang of it, I could adjust any recipe we were using! I finally quit talking about it around him and got good at adding it to recipes he already loves. As long as I don’t bring it up, he will have no clue he’s eating peas, green beans and carrots in his favorite nacho recipe. 🤣🤣

Today we tried a new recipe. I woke up to a text from my best friend involving some delicious pumpkin spiced tea from a fellow Cottey alumn named Zhena. Her teas are to die for!

https://m.youtube.com/shorts/Or3lQG-j7E4?si=GHIkVn-0M4b64Tbi

This inspired me! On a whim and a dash of luck, I came up with a whole new recipe: Apple Pumpkin Pancakes. I must have gotten a wild hair to go out on such a limb with 3 hungry kids and my popularity with them on the line, but lucky for me it panned out. (No pun intended) 😂 So grab your pancake griddles and try out these new household favorites! 🍎🎃🥞

Apple Pumpkin Pancakes

2 c. Unbleached organic flour

1/4 c. Organic cane sugar

4 tsp. Organic Baking powder

1/4 tsp. Organic baking soda

1/2 tsp. Organic Himalayan pink salt

1/2 c. Organic pumpkin powder

1/2 c. Unsweetened Applesauce

Cinnamon to taste

Whisk your dry ingredients until smooth and evenly distributed. Then create a “volcano” in the middle of your dry mix and add the following:

1 3/4 c. Milk (or your preferred bake safe dairy substitute)

1/4 c. Unsweetened organic applesauce

2 tsp. Vanilla

1 egg

1/2 c. Water

Mix until smooth and add more water if desired. The water depends on how dense you like your pancakes. We used a 1/3 cup to measure the batter out onto the griddle. The batter is so thick, I wouldn’t recommend doing larger scoops. It may not cook as well. We fried ours at 350° until golden, flipped and repeated on the other side. Top them with agave, molasses or maple syrup. Don’t forget the top hat of whipped cream!

These are delicious! Not to mention all of the nutritional value they offer! Did you know that a single cup of pumpkin offers 87% of your daily Vitamin A intake? 🤯 Check out the other fantastic reasons to jump right into pumpkin season and keep it rolling year round:

I hope this post helped you find some way to ease the food struggles in your house, or at least to feel like your not alone out there. Sometimes parenting can feel very isolating. It can be so full of unwarranted opinions from outsiders. Just remember that you know your family best. Not the schools, not their doctors and not even that overbearing grandma you keep having to deal with. You. You know best. And your doing your best. Just keep going, stick to your boundaries and trust your instinct. Parenting is the hardest job on the planet, but also the most rewarding. You got this. 💪

Namaste,

Sam