"deceptively delicious" news and stories

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It turns out it was a lawsuit about nothing.

A judge has tossed out a plagiarism and copyright infringement lawsuit alleging Jerry Seinfeld's wife stole her cookbook idea from another author.

Federal Court Judge Laura Taylor Swain dismissed the suit by author Missy Chase Lapine alleging the ideas and recipes for Jessica Seinfeld's "Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food" came from her "The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids' Favorite Meals," the New York Daily News reports.

"This is a complete vindication of Jessica's creativity," Orin Snyder, a lawyer for Jessica Seinfeld, told the Daily News.

The judge said the only similarity between the books was their goal of hiding healthy food inside kids' meals, the Associated Press reports.

Swain declined to rule on defamation claims against Jerry Seinfeld, saying they should be filed in state court. Last year, the funnyman appeared on "The Late Show with David Letterman" and joked that people with three names like James Earl Ray and Mark David Chapman turn out to be assassins, the AP said.

Lapine's lawyer told the AP that claim and one against HarperCollins -- the publisher of the Seinfeld book -- "are still very much alive."

[Via Daily News, Associated Press]

We told you recently about the controversy surrounding Jessica Seinfeld's Deceptively Delicous cookbook and how some people think it's a lot like another hide-veggies-in-your-kids-food tome, Missy Chase Lapine's The Sneaky Chef. Now hubby Jerry has spoken out on the subject.

He appeared on The Late Show With David Letterman last night, and besides talking about his new movie about bees, he brought up the controversy. Besides telling Letterman that it's ridiculous that his wife would do anything like steal cooking ideas, he also called Lapine a "wacko" and said that you have to look out for people who use three names because they often turn out to be assassins. No word from Lapine yet.

Meanwhile, Slate thinks both cookbooks aren't worth much, but similarities don't equal plagiarism.

I watched the episode of Oprah a few weeks ago that had Jerry Seinfeld's wife Jessica, talking about her new get-your-kids-to-eat cookbook Deceptively Delicious. Basically, she purees up the good stuff her kids should be eating (broccoli, cauliflower, other veggies) and secretly puts them inside foods that her kids really love (chicken fingers, chocolate chip cookies, etc). But is this a new thing?

I ask this because I had heard about doing something similar, and a woman who wrote and published another cookbook is wondering if the two projects are too similar. Missy Chase Lapine, author of The Sneaky Chef (published in April by Running Press), says that her publicists pitched the idea to Oprah five times with no luck, and then six months later Jessica Seinfeld is on the show with her cookbook doing very similar recipes and cooking tips, and that Oprah it was being "touted as an entirely new technique."

The first time my mom gave my younger sister a taste of mashed banana when she was a baby, my sister screamed and hollered like she was being poisoned. My mother was really confused by her behavior as I had loved mashed banana as a baby. She even went so far as to take a taste of the bananas, to make sure that they hadn't gone bad. They were perfectly fine. To this day, my sister still isn't particularly fond of bananas.

Yesterday, the New York Times Dining and Wine section ran an article on kids who are picky eaters and a recent study that may have confirmed that being a averse to new foods may well be a trait that is based in biology. It seems that it's fairly normal for kids to be off-put by new foods as that was a way for them to be protected from the hazards of the world back in our caveman days. They have some good suggestions from the experts on ways to handle introducing new foods to your reluctant kids and mention a book by Jessica Seinfeld (wife of Jerry Seinfeld) on ways to hide healthy food in with the stuff your kids will eat.

For those of you out there who are parents, were your kids picky eaters? If so, how did you handle it?

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