15 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:
Food for Thought
Teach your kids about nutrition through music!
Groovin' Foods is a collection of exciting songs that will entertain and instruct your children on healthy eating. Kids will dance & sing along—while learning about the foods that keep them healthy, fit, and strong. Parents will also love these tunes, which run the gamut from rock & roll, Latin, blues, reggae, pop, and more!
Food for Thought
Have your kids log their exercise for a week so that they understand the importance of regular physical activity and feel proud about the accomplishment.
Monday: Rode my bike for 1 hour
Tuesday; Dance class for 45 minutes
Wednesday: Walked the dog for 20 minutes
- Add a mixed vegetable medley to your meatloaf recipe.
- Scatter cooked vegetables throughout pasta and then cover with marinara sauce.
- Grate carrots into tuna or chicken salad and stuff in a pita pocket.
- Make homemade pizza. Toss on sliced mushrooms and chopped broccoli before spreading on the cheese.
- 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.
- Add cooked peas, corn, and carrots to mashed potatoes.
- Serve vegetable soup with crackers.
- 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.
- Top a baked potato with chopped broccoli and low-fat melted cheese.
- Make low-fat zucchini and carrot muffins.
- Serve “make-your-own tacos” and have different stations set up with lean ground beef (or ground turkey), sliced tomatoes, shredded lettuce, and carrots.
- 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.
- Finely chop cooked broccoli and thoroughly mix into your rice.
- 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.
- 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 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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