Creative Ways to Add More Fruits and Vegetables to Your Diet
Getting more fruits and vegetables into your family’s diet can be challenging. Luckily, there are many ways to add more into your meals. I have found some creative ways to sneak the vegetables in, especially if you have children. One way is to sample a new fruit or vegetable at least twice a month. If you don’t really care for it at first, try it at least 4 more times, but prepared in different ways. When I do this, I find that most times I eventually start to like the new fruit or vegetable. This is a good way to try new food with young children. You’ll see that after a few tries they will often begin to like the taste.
Here are some ways you can sneak in those new fruits and vegetables.
- Add vegetables such as peppers, onions, mushrooms, garlic, squash and/or cauliflower to your meatballs or meatloaf. Also, if making meatballs or even meat sauce, adding spinach or kale along with these other vegetables into the sauce is a really good way to get in extra vegetables.
- Add mushrooms, onions, broccoli, peppers, spinach, kale and/or tomatoes to scrambled eggs.
- Add blueberries, strawberries, bananas or carrots to homemade breads and muffins.
- Cut up vegetables and fruits, and store them in the refrigerator to have easy access when looking for a snack.
- Have a smoothie for breakfast with Greek yogurt, spinach, kale, frozen riced cauliflower, berries and bananas.
- Have oatmeal or whole grain pancakes for breakfast and add fresh berries, bananas, shredded carrots or zucchini.
- Freeze berries and banana slices. Add the berries and bananas to a blender or food processor and blend for a smooth consistency. Eat this in place of ice cream.
- Make animals out of fruits and vegetables for children. Celery with an all natural nut butter topped with raisins or grapes becomes ants on a log.
- Use spaghetti squash, spiralized zucchini or sweet potatoes to replace spaghetti with a vegetable. Or use zucchini or eggplant as the noodles in lasagna.
- Grill vegetable kabobs with bell peppers, onions, zucchini and mushrooms.
- Replace rice with riced cauliflower.
Hopefully this has given you some ideas to be more creative with vegetables and fruit. Feel free to share your ideas in the comments below.
