What's your best trick for hiding veggies in a meal?!
What's your best trick for hiding veggies in a meal?
Answers:
my mother used to grate up zucchini and carrots in spaghetti sauce you really can't tell!
cover them with cheese...most kids love cheese :)
hands down making a soup by boiling all diced veggies and liquifying it all together. or even a lasange
Put them in my mouth,chew, and swallow. I can hide a lot of them this way!
I mix in corn kernels or sprouted lentils into taco meat.
Use cheese or pasta to help blend veggies into meals. Think veggie pizzas!
My father makes soup all the time and my brother hates tomatoes and mushrooms and i hate onions so he purays it and it has a great texture and tast but the tast of the veggies is blended in to much for kids to notice
try mixing them under the cheese and sauce on homemade pizza.
Covering then in cheese, shredding them and adding them to your dishes... Good luck
My husband doesn't like onions, but I put them in EVERYTHING! I just put them in the food processor until they are like baby food. He has no clue why everything tastes so good. I am sure you could do this with any veggie.
His most favorite: Meatloaf.........with onions, celery and carrots. If I told him what was in it he wouldn't believe me!
I shred zucchini and carrots into my spaghetti sauce. After it cooks for hours you don't even know its there. Also instead of lettuce on my kids sandwiches I put raw spinach. They have no idea to this day. Also in chili, I put grated zucchini. I also put the same in meatloaf. I am assuming you don't eat meat since this is in the vegetarian sections. But if you do eat meat, you can put almost anything in meatloaf and noone has a clue. When I make salads, I use romaine lettuce, but I add tons of raw spinach.
make healthy muffins: you can add zucchini and/or carrots, to raisin bran muffins.=different fruits too like dates and figs
It who ever doesn't like onions; puree them
make "fried" sweet potato french fries bake them in the oven
cook them on a BBQ with the burgers or make Kabobs.
if YOU don't like them and are trying to get kids to eat them go by good example!
or you can do the good 'ol southern thing and just fry every thing, including pickles, cauliflower, you name it fry it, it's actually good!
grind up veggies in food processor and add it to gound turkey....then, make into patties and BBQ on the grill. Tasty turkey (I use the lean 98% Fat Free type) burgers. Serve it with tomatoes and lettuce (more veggies) and I usually cut up some potatos and bake them as fries. Good stuff!
Spaghetti sauces, thick soups and stews are great for making veggies less obvious. Also, if one has a colorful assortment they can pass in pasta salads, rice dishes, and other foods simply on aesthetics. These are both super ways to pack more nutrition into family recipes. My kids have yet to complain about this tactic vs. servings of "nakie" veggies.
I use blending. You can add blended veggies to soups, sauces, meatloaf, tacos.. almost anything! You can also substitute veggie burgers for meats once in a while. Much lighter tasting.
You can also sneak veggies in with those ready to buy drinks that have both veggies and fruit juice, they're delicious!
If you don't have a blender, baby food veggies are great to add to foods, they're already nicely smooth.
Some kids eat only salad, but not cooked vegetables.. You can experiment.
My mom had a recipe for vegetable cutlets that was delicious for a meatless meal, they had potatoes and lots of other vegetables, and tasted so good that we didn't mind them at all. She also made wonderfully creamy creamed spinach, which was odd, because I'd eat it even though I hated spinach!
Don't worry too much, if your kids like fruit, but not vegetables, they will surely get the vitamins they need.
Just make sure that theres always a colorful selection, and let them choose their own snacks from the fruit bowl.
Why hide them? Vegetables and fruits together are the largest sources for all the things that keep us healthy. When a human eats flesh...your just consuming crude forms of energy, from an animal that most likely ate vegetables, fruits and/or grains to build that tissue healthy.
If your hiding them in dishes where they are cooked down significantly you are destroying much of what is good about vegetables. The best solution is to work towards not trying to hide them and explain better why its important to eat them.
Vegans are living proof that 'all' vegetables can be enjoyed, it's just a matter of breaking habits or biases that can't really be explained.
is this some perverted version of "hide the weenie"
food processor
no trick and no hiding. i buy veggies that look good and cut them or use a chopper. then, i add them to almost everything. no reason for deception.