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.
