Ways To Increase Your Veggie Intake Without Tasting Them

With a two-year-old in the house and a husband who likes his dinners consisting of at least 60-70% vegetables, meal-planning can get somewhat difficult. Like many toddlers, my son does not enjoy anything green on his plate, so we have to get sneaky with our cooking.

Add greens to your foods.

Leafy greens, especially spinach and collard greens, have become a staple in this house for many reasons. They are one of my superfoods, because they are high in so many essential vitamins and minerals, including calcium. Since Gabriel is allergic to milk, we have to make sure he is getting enough calcium through the foods he eats.

Greens are also very easy to hide in our food. We hide them in our noodles and just about any dish we make with ground meat, like meatballs, meatloaf, tacos, spaghetti, etc. You can't really taste the greens in the food, which is why Gabe will gobble these dishes up without caring that there is something green on his plate.

Add pureed veggies to your dishes.

Another method for hiding veggies in your food is to include pureed versions in your dishes. Over the summer I bought extra produce at the Farmer's Market and made/froze homemade baby food for David, but later decided not to introduce solid foods until after he was 9 months old. By the time he was eating solids he wasn't very interested in the pureed versions and went straight to finger foods. This left me with gallons of frozen squash, apples, pumpkin and pears in my freezer.

The baby food is made by softening the veggies (I prefer to steam them to maintain more of the vitamin content) and then blending them in the food processor. Then I spoon the puree into ice cube trays and freeze them. Once they are frozen you can break the cubes apart and store them in freezer bags.



When preparing your dinner, just throw a few cubes into the dish (each cube is approximately 2 tablespoons).



They will melt down and you will barely taste them in your meal.

You may not have a picky toddler in your house, but perhaps you have a spouse that doesn't like to eat veggies. Maybe you have extra produce that will go bad soon and you don't know what to do with it. Or perhaps you are just looking for ways to increase your vegetable intake without having to eat salads at every meal. Pureeing, freezing and sneaking them into your food is a perfect solution!

As always, make sure your produce is locally grown, organic, and in-season.

-Jessica

Recipe for the meal shown above:
Brown one pound of free range turkey with baby spinach, carrots, celery, fresh parsley, 2 cloves of garlic, 5 cubes of squash, sea salt, and some pure olive oil (make sure it is regular olive oil, not virgin or extra virgin).