Fifteen Ways to Disguise Vegetables

Your kid won't go near vegetables? See if you can sneak in a few here and there with some of these suggestions:

1. Add a mixed vegetable medley to your meatloaf recipe.
2. Scatter cooked vegetables throughout pasta and then cover with marinara sauce.
3. Grate carrots into tuna or chicken salad and stuff in a pita pocket.
4. Make homemade pizza. Toss on sliced mushrooms and chopped broccoli before spreading on the cheese.
5. Make vegetable lasagna. You can stick with a single vegetable such as spinach or mix in a variety of chopped, cooked vegetables, such as zucchini, cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, mushrooms, green beans, and so on.
6. Add cooked peas, corn, and carrots to mashed potatoes.
7. Serve vegetable soup with crackers.
8. Puree cooked squash and carrots and then add small amounts into your ground beef or ground turkey. Shape into hamburgers or turkey-burgers and cook on the grill.
9. Top a baked potato with chopped broccoli and low-fat melted cheese.
10. Make low-fat zucchini and carrot muffins.
11. Serve “make-your-own tacos” and have different stations set up with lean ground beef (or ground turkey), sliced tomatoes, shredded lettuce, and carrots.
12. Make chicken-vegetable kabobs. Alternate chunks of grilled chicken, peppers, tomatoes, onions, zucchini, and mushrooms on metal skewers. Set up a variety of dips that your kids can have fun experimenting with, such as barbecue sauce, honey mustard sauce, sweet and sour sauce, and low-fat salad dressings. Of course, maybe you'll get lucky and your kids will simply like the original marinade.
13. Finely chop cooked broccoli and thoroughly mix into your rice.
14. Turn your kids on to wok cooking and have them assist with washing and cutting up the vegetables. Try chicken-vegetable stir-fry, beef-vegetable stir-fry, or seafood-vegetable stir-fry. Pour them all over rice or linguini and hand out the chopsticks.
15. Make a spinach dip with low-fat plain yogurt, low-fat sour cream, and pureed cooked spinach. Have them dip carrots, celery, peppers, and zucchini slices. If they don't want to dip with raw veggies, give them some crackers; at least they'll get the spinach from the dip.

Excerpted from:

Excerpted from The Complete Idiot's Guide to Total Nutrition © 2005 by Joy Bauer. All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Used by arrangement with Alpha Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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