Getting young children to eat their veggies can often be a painful process. Whether it's the appearance, texture, or inherent knowledge that they are healthy, many children take a long time to get used to eating them. As we all know how important it is to stock up on veggies, here are a few sneaky ways to fit a couple of extra servings into your daily meals, that could make your life a little bit easier.
Mix up Family Favorites
An easy way to sneak in extra vegetables is to take failsafe dishes that your child is happy eating and add in some mild tasting vegetables that aren't noticeable.
The opportunities are endless, but vegetables like spinach, squash or zucchini are fairly mild tasting.
A few ideas and recipes:
Get Creative
Bland, boring looking vegetables aren't going to encourage your child to eat them. If you have a a creative streak, use it to make fun, colorful lunchboxes with different colored vegetables.
Mini cookie cutters can also be fun to make veggies into decorations or kebabs.
Photo:Super Healthy Kids
Blend Them In
As mentioned above, some vegetables are mild tasting so can be easily blended up without tasting suspicious for little ones. Pasta sauces are ideal for this!
Try adding in zucchini, eggplant, broccoli, spinach or cauliflower to regular bolognese or tomato based sauces and blend before serving.
Soups are also a great way to rack up the veggie intake. If a plain soup like tomato is acceptable with your child, start adding more in- they'll never know the difference!
Smoothies
Smoothies are a real winner- they taste great, look appetizing (most of the time!) and you can cram lots of vitamins and goodness into each serving.
Besides the regular fruit, juices or milk that you put in your smoothies, try adding a handful of spinach. you'll get all the goodness and not taste a thing!
Have a go at some of these and see how your kids get on!
Sneaky Baking
If your kid is happy to eat cakes but refuses to eat veggies, you could be in luck. There are some great new recipes emerging meaning that you can bake up treats like brownies, muffins, and cookies without too much sugar, and even with portions of vegetables sneaked in!
Have a go at these carrot and zucchini mini muffins for a quick snack.
So whether you have a laid back, easygoing young eater or a fussy kitchen nightmare, hopefully this will help to sneak a in few more portions of veggies without too much trouble.
If you loved this blog post, check out this quick video:
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