Un-ketchup!

So Nolan is a ketchup lover! Truthfully he is a lover of all dips. Unfortunately though he licks the dip off and is a double....well usually quadruple dipper. That means he doesn't get much of the calories from the food he is dipping but ends up eating a lot of the condiment. He's also kind of sensitive to acidic foods so I decided to find something to substitute for acidic ketchup. I thought ranch might be nice especially since he is so tiny and needs calories anyways. He eats it sometime but it's not a love like with ketchup. The second I put the red sauce on his plate he gets happy!

I started googling non-tomato ketchup but didn't come up with much. Mainly a few yahoo questions where a some geniuses posted "You can't make ketchup without tomatoes. It's the main ingredient." Determined to do so, I searched on. Eventually, I found this recipe. I tweaked it a bit using a standard ketchup recipe for the spices so Nol would have something that tasted as true as possible. Here is how we started.

Yum veggies on the stove.

Carrots, beets, and yellow squash boiling on the stove were the start. Then my much neglected food processor did the rest. In went a little lemon juice as a preservative, a few spices, and a hint of brown sugar.

The food processor looked quite colorful but at least the end result is "red" enough to let Nolan think it's ketchup. So far my little monster hasn't figured out he is eating veggies. He even eats it by the spoonful like he would do with ketchup!! One word to anyone thinking of doing the same. If your child isn't too particular about the color use golden beets. The red ones stain everything!!