Cheat's pesto and other business...

First of all I want to start this post by announcing the winner of the Lovely Little Giveaway....congratulations to Joann at Woman in Real Life: The Art of Everyday.  I'm so pleased that Jo is our winner, she's lovely and her blog is fantastic.  Check it out!  I also want to say a massive thank you to Tabetha for putting the giveaway together and for all her hard work organising eight unruly bloggers.   You really are a marvel Tabetha!

I also wanted to say a huge and heartfelt thank you to each and every one of my wonderful followers. I am so grateful to anyone who would take the time to follow my blog or read my bits and bobs.  Whenever I have a little nose at my figures I am pleased as punch, thank you all so much.  If you have a blog yourself and you don't use it to follow, please let me know your URL so I can follow in return!

Right, back to business....

I am a bad Mummy sometimes when it comes to feeding my children. For some reason I get "Meal Blindness" when I try and think of a suitable nutritious meal for them to eat that doesn't take six hours to prepare. I am also prone to suffering from "Google Blindness". This does not involve looking up rude stuff on the interwebs until my eyes stop working. It is the far more common phenomenon of sitting in front of the Google homepage without a flippin' clue about what I was supposed to be looking up....

Anyway, I digress....usually my emergency spare tea for That Baby is pasta & pesto. Quick, simple and she loves it. I've always been a little concerned about the lack of vegetable matter in this dish, but I try to console myself with the thought that it does contain lots of basil and she doesn't have it that often.

Yesterday we'd eaten a big lunch (thanks Dad) so didn't want anything else to eat til late, but we needed to feed the little ones. No problem I thought, I'll crack out the pasta and pesto! Yes problem I discovered, no pesto. Drat!

So I improvised! I boiled the pasta as usual, took two frozen spinach blocks and popped them in a pan on the hob to cook through. Once they had I added a little grated mature cheddar and a little olive oil and stirred.

It looked like pesto. But it contained spinach. In our house spinach is an elusive vegetable, loved by me, but treated with deep suspicion by everyone else. It's my own fault, when she was very small I'd sneak some into quite a number of That Baby's dishes to alleviate my fear of bad things happening upon the presentation of vegetable free meals. What can I say, Annabel Karmel looked at me with those eyes, those disapproving, step away from the nuggets, eyes. My cover was eventually blown when I was unintentionally outed by another Mum who casually presented my daughter with a tea of macaroni cheese that wasn't....gasp...green!

Last night I didn't tell the little scamp that we had no pesto, I just gave her the spinach laced dish and remained silent. She asked no questions and wolfed the lot!

I spent the next hour feeling incredibly smug that I'd tricked her into eating an iron rich vegetable dish without her knowledge.

Admittedly it's not exactly the four year old's version of haute cuisine, but I like to think Annabel would at least tip me a wink for not calling on the services of Captain Birdseye.