Ten Kid-Friendly Dishes To Sneak Vegetables In

If your kids are not big on eating their vegetables, the most import thing is knowing which dishes are the best for hiding the veggie monsters. Hint: don't try to feed them your salad. The best way to sneak in vegetables is to puree them. This way, the texture of the original dish is not effected and the flavor of the vegetables is less noticeable.

The best dishes to sneak vegetables are those that are:

a. Child -friendly. Don't pick something form the French cuisine cookbook and expect your kids to love it. The may, but there is no guarantees.

b. Puree-friendly. Some dishes don't work if you add a vegetable puree to them. Souffle, anyone? Keep that in mind prior to cooking.

This leaves us with the following list:

1. Creamy pureed soups. Potatoes, squash, sweet potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower and even celery and kale can be successfully pureed and blended with some olive oil and spices. Sometimes, you need to use a bit of soft tofu or cream and sometimes croutons on top work well as a bribe.

2. Smoothies. Nobody really knows what's in them. Put a banana or two, add a pitted date and you are golden. Feel free to add kale leaves, while no one is looking.

3. Grain-based dishes, like risotto. It's going to look like a mash, anyway, so why not add some butternut squash, cauliflower or carrot puree?

4. Pasta sauces. As long as your sauce has fresh or sundried tomatoes and some olive oil, everything else is up to you. How about some broccoli, celery and zucchini, too?

5. Baked goods: muffins and breads. Virtually any muffin or bread recipe can include some fresh vegetables, pureed or grated. Carrots, green beans, peas, squashes, pumpkin -all work very well!

6. Baked chocolate goods. If it's dark, nobody will see what's in it! I always put some diced kale leaves in my brownies.

7. Mashed potatoes. Add any other vegetable puree and if you must lie, say you used food coloring. Mashed potatoes are so delicious, nobody will notice anything you did.

8. Dips. Homemade hummus, cheese dip: any dip can survive the addition of a bit of vegetable puree. Sometimes a bit of pureed celery or parsley can even improve the dip's flavor.

9 Creamy pies. Add a bit of cauliflower puree, for good luck. It wouldn't even change the color of the original recipe, so why not?

10. Casseroles. Nobody really knows what's in them anyway. So, no one will notice a bit of pureed veggies.

Article by Dr. Anastasia Halldin.
Dr Halldin is a stay at home mom of an active toddler and baby-twins. She has a Ph. D in holistic nutrition, is a yoga teacher and a former model. She has produced and appeared in thirteen yoga DVDs, wrote a brochure on nutrition and starred in a yoga TV show. She speaks four languages and makes yummy healthy meals for the whole family in twenty minutes. For recipes and more, visit: http://www.healthymamainfo.com. For yoga DVDs, visit http://www.yogapulse.com

Posted in: Cooking For Kids