happy green-day; William Norwich grazes on nutritious nursery food at a garden party thrown by Jessica Seinfeld with recipes from her new cookbook for parents.(Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food)

Byline: William Norwich

In the cozy cottage kitchen of her fairy-tale beach house, Jessica Seinfeld, in a Peter Som sundress and a striped Bitten T-shirt, is concocting mother's magic. She hides cauliflower in chicken nuggets, folds butternut squash into macaroni and cheese, and sneaks spinach into individual-size pita pizzas for a children's pea-picking party in her enchanted garden-organic, of course-on the East End of Long Island this afternoon.

"The last time I said, 'Eat your vegetables' was just under two years ago," Seinfeld recalls as she lightly sprinkles confectioners' sugar on doughnuts she has made with pumpkin and sweet potato. "One day I just stopped. I could not argue with my kids anymore at mealtime. Everyone knows that children mimic their parents. I realized that if I whined at them about their vegetables, they'd whine back about that-and everything else. Meals are a time when we should be enjoying one another."

Seinfeld is known for activities designed to benefit children: She founded the nonprofit organization Baby Buggy in 2001, after her daughter, Sascha, was born and she wanted to recycle her outgrown, gently used children's gear to families who could not afford even the basic child necessities. Now, she says, "since I like to think that every problem in life has a solution, I decided I would find a way to take 'Eat your vegetables' out of the family meal forever!"

The result is Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food, an accessible, parent-friendly cookbook and how-to guide with nearly 100 recipes, published this month by HarperCollins. (Updates, new recipes, and advice will appear regularly on Jessica's Web site.) Careful to make sure their flavor did not overpower the taste of any dish, Jessica started her kitchen adventure by cautiously hiding vegetable purees (made in advance and kept in the freezer for ready use when cooking) in her children's food-in addition to Sascha, she has Julian, four, and Shepherd, two. The experiment continued with consultations with Roxana Mehran, M.D., and Mehmet Oz, M.D., who have written the foreword to Deceptively Delicious, and input from parenting experts Jean Mandelbaum, Ph.D., and Pat Shimm; all the recipes conform to nutritionist Joy Bauer's exacting standards. Jessica then distilled her research into practical recipes with the help of chef Jennifer Iserloh and figured out exactly which simple kitchen supplies and organizational system you needed to prepare low-fat, healthy things, like spaghetti and meatballs (with butternut squash) or chocolate-chip cookies (with chickpeas), in less ...