Learn to Love: Vegetables

Learn to Love Vegetables by North Carolina Lifestyle Blogger Adventures of Frugal Mom

Okay, so we all know by now how healthy and essential vegetables are, and we know that we never eat enough of them. That’s not the point. The point is that they’re just not yummy!…at least, for some of us! We want longer lives, better dental health, healthier weights, but it’s hard! How can we get ourselves to like veggies more? There are, fortunately, plenty of tactics to get our vegetable game on.

Prepare them the best way for you

Cook ‘em, cover ‘em, cut and boil ‘em–maybe the issue with veggies is in the preparation. Try dipping raw carrots, broccoli, celery, and pepper slices in ranch or hummus. If you’re cooking veggies, toss them with olive oil and salt. Try out basil pesto, vinaigrette, and lemon sauce. Also, try out new spices!

You can boil, puree, grill, saute, stir-fry, or eat veggies raw. There are tons of ways to cook them. You can even drop veggies like kale and spinach into a smoothie with fruit and peanut butter, which can help cover up the vegetable taste.

You might also try international veggie dishes. Try a curry dish, or maybe a Chinese dish such as Moo Goo Gai Pan. Sometimes, it just takes new sauces, spices, and textures to get our brains to open up.

Find your “gateway veggie”

Sometimes, all it takes is one successful vegetable to open the door to all the others. So try, try, try! Try a few new veggies every day, and keep an open mind. Remember, exposure works, but it takes kids several tries of a particular food for them to develop a taste for it, and the same may be true for us. So give each vegetable a couple of tries. Our taste buds also change every seven years, which means you might now like the vegetables you didn’t like as a kid.

Once you’ve found “your” veggie (and it may also be a specific way of preparing it), stick with it for a little while and slowly branch out.

Sneak them in

You don’t necessarily have to have “veggie” items in order to get your veggies in. Much like in the smoothies we talked about above, there are ways to sneak vegetables into other foods. You can put some in lasagna or casserole, add a little broccoli to potato soup, and slap an onion and tomato on a burger. You can make garden burgers, using spices, which often have a non-vegetable texture to them. Olives, tomatoes, and mushrooms go well in omelets. If you put peppers or olives in your pasta, you can wrap them up in the noodles to help cover the taste.

Grow your own

Develop ownership over your veggies, and you might be more inclined to partake of them. If you have a little bit of land, try planting your own vegetable garden. Start with just one or two plants, and then branch out. Even if you don’t have a yard, you can still grow some herbs in flower pots! Fresh produce can often taste a lot better than the stuff we get from the store, too.

Similar Posts:

Similar Posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.