Spinach pancakes {Picky Tot Pleasers}

This post originally appeared as a guest post on another site about two years ago, but that site is no longer around. :/ SO, I’m re-claiming it and adding it to my Picky-Tot Pleasers series. Lemme know what’cha think!

Call me Popeye. What can I say? I love to cook with spinach. Up until recently, it’s been in just about any dish I made with chicken or ground turkey. However, I crossed the line the other morning when I (deliberately) baked spinach in to my pancakes. That’s right, my daughter and I made spinach pancakes. On purpose.

My three-year-old daughter comes from a long line of picky eaters, so I’m always looking for ways to stuff extra veggies in to her diet. And since, in our house, she’s regarded as The Pancake Kid, it seemed only natural to try to stuff some veggies in to her pancakes. We’ve done bananas and we’ve done applesauce in our pancakes, but I really wanted to push the envelope. After all, my kid needs iron!

So, she and I traipsed in to the kitchen a few mornings ago, and made our pancakes as usual, but with one special ingredient. She looked at me curiously as I finely chopped up about a cup of fresh (not frozen) spinach. (If you have a Vitamix or other strong blender, you can toss the spinach in to the blender and pound it in to a nice pulp.) We stirred it in to the batter, and she watched in amazement as it tinged the batter a slightly green color. We prepared them as usual, and things went off without a hitch. Drenched with just the right amount of syrup, she gobbled them up!

Next up, we may experiment with something perhaps a bit more tame, like squash. But for now, I’ve found a way to not only give my daughter an extra boost of iron, but also a way to spend quality time baking and bonding. :o)
Tell me, what creative ways do YOU get veggies in to your picky eaters? What dishes have you infused with veggies?