8 Ways To Sneak Some Extra Fruits And Vegetables In Your Family’s Diet
shivani k 
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Making sure that everyone in the family has a fair share of fruits and veggies in their diet is a big challenge for anyone who is in charge of meal planning. All of us are fussy eaters, especially when it comes to eating vegetables and fruits. Your partner might love cauliflower, but your daughter probably doesn’t. The entire family might love tomatoes but you don’t. It’s a difficult situation to be in when you know that you need to include vegetables and fruits in your family’s diet, but you’re not able to do so because of their individual preferences. In order to have a balanced diet we need at least five servings of vegetables and fruits every day. But what can we do with this knowledge if we can’t apply it? The only way out of this conundrum is to get creative and include the veggies and fruits in our diet in such a way that the person consuming it doesn’t come to know that they are in fact eating the same veggies and fruits that they hate so much.
Here a few recipes that we found online that can do the trick for all you worrisome mothers and fathers.
1. Smoothie Your Way To Breakfast
Ditch the everyday routine of pleading with kids to get them to eat their milk and cereal or the roasted veggies, instead serve them a delicious smoothie. Use the fruits you have and veggies like spinach or kale, which your kids might hate eating otherwise, to make a smoothie. To make it look more appealing add a scoop of ice cream or yoghurt. Your kids will be supremely happy to find a thick yummy shake replacing their boring milk.
2. Dry Fruit Munchies As Snacks
Your kids, your husband, and even you might have snack breaks at your respective schools, colleges, and workplaces. While we are tending to our duties, we often crave to eat some junk food as we associate it with the idea of snacking. If you want a healthier alternative, you can replace the potato chips with dry fruits. Either give it to them as it is or caramelize some sugar and add the dry fruits to it. And then you can either mold them into small balls or spread them out on a butter paper. Once cooled, you can cut them into bars. Voila! Dry fruit munchies are ready.
3. Family’s DIY Salad Time
Here’s a great idea. Why don’t you set up a salad bar on your dinner table? Chop them up — the vegetables and the greens. Place some pumpkin seeds, flax seeds, olives next to the chopped-up goodness. Also, prepare different salad dressings with different bases such as the ones with an oil base or cream base. Now let your family make their own salad according to their preferences and watch them eat healthily the fun way.
4. Get Healthy The Exotic Way
Sometimes, our families get bored of eating the same vegetables and fruits. Thanks to the export markets that are found in abundance these days, and the availability of all kinds of exotic vegetables in our nearby supermarket store, we can easily get our hands on not so common vegetables and fruits. Introduce your family to a vegetable or fruit that they’ve eaten before. They would love to try it out and will not say no to it. You could get watermelon radish, dragon fruit, mangosteen, tomatillo, goji berry, durian, purple sweet potato etc. Try this, it will be fun!
5. Sauce It Your Way
One way to make use of vegetables and spices which your family doesn’t like eating is to make a sauce with them. Of course, no one likes to eat ginger, garlic, onion in their raw form. Google some Indian dishes which use these vegetables as ingredients of a yummilicious gravy. Once you’ve made the gravy, add your choice of pasta to it and grate some c heese over it and voila! You have added your own healthy twist to the pasta.
6. Make Vegetable Pancakes
Pancakes and maple syrup are a match made in heaven; we agree! But, why not include vegetables in your pancakes. You can do it two ways: one is to chop the vegetables up and use them as topping; two, you could put them in the pancake batter and make savory pancakes for the family. Just like the beet powder is used to make the heavenly red velvet cake, use beetroot puree in your pancake batter, and make berry-colored pancakes. Get creative with your choices and colors here.
7. Hide Them In The Cookies
Yes, cookies. You can make healthy cookie dough by adding a carrot or a sweet potato puree to the batter. You can use this stealthy technique while making brownies and cakes as well. Psst… try to include spinach too. If you want the veggies to be in incognito mode decorate the cookies with sprinkles to keep them from figuring out that.
8. Just Frittata It
How about ditching that drive to the nearby diner where you end up eating the sinfully loaded burgers? Instead, why don’t you make an egg-heavy brunch for your family? Whisk as many eggs you want. Add chopped up vegetables and greens along with your favorite spices to the mix before cooking it in a little drizzle of oil. Finish it off by keeping a chunk of cheese in between after flipping. And your frittata is ready to be gorged on.
There’s no limit to your creativity here. So, go on, switch on the stealth mode and hide the healthy stuff in your dishes so that your family’s diet is on fleek. Do you know any other hacks by which we can healthi-fy our meals? Let us know in the comments below.
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