If your child hardly eats any vegetables, we as parents have to get creative. With our 5 tips you can do this very easily.
Table of contents
- 1. Puree it
- 2. Serve with dips
- 3. Hide unwanted vegetables
- 4. Make vegetable noodles
- 5. Cut and arrange it nicely
Did you know that we 'lose' many taste buds throughout our lives? As a child you have much, much more. Which leads to children tasting more intensely. So intense that the bitter substances contained in vegetables can be tasted well. And because they don't like them at all, many children don't like certain types of vegetables.
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So it doesn't really matter that mom and dad set a good example and enjoy their portion of vegetables, that the family always eats together and that everyone even helps with the preparation. Many children end up not touching their vegetables. Not entirely without reason, but sometimes also out of principle, for example because it is green.
So how do you get one or two vitamins from broccoli, carrots, peppers etc. into your offspring without them causing a dwarf rebellion at the table? With a few tricks that will convince even the most stubborn of vegetables. Even if mom and dad might have to cheat a little.
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1. Puree it
Most children love colorful food, but often not if it looks like vegetables. However, you can get around this with cream soups or sauces. With a purple soup, the little ones don't even notice that it's made from purple broccoli or beetroot - it's still delicious and healthy too!
Bonus points if you can dip a little more. Every food is more fun if you can play with it a little. Add a few bread sticks to the soup and you have created a new favorite meal.
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2. Serve with dips
It's not just pureed vegetables in the form of soups that taste better when you can dip something into them. The whole thing also works the other way around: raw vegetable sticks taste much better when served with a dip. Peppers, celery stalks, carrots, cucumbers, kohlrabi - if you cut them into sticks, they look less like vegetables and are therefore much more appealing to children's eyes. The colorful pens can also be easily dipped in herbal quark, for example.
3. Hide unwanted vegetables
When children discover an onion, they usually don't want to eat it. Cut very finely and mixed into a (vegetarian) meatball, it no longer bothers them because they don't even notice that the onion is still there.
The same applies to spinach, carrots, cauliflower, broccoli or similar. If it is cut finely enough and used in dough or mixed with eggs, mashed potatoes or meat, very few children will notice it. In the end, they like it despite the unloved vegetables.
4. Make vegetable noodles
Children love pasta and they love colorful pasta even more! Zucchini, carrots or beetroot are ideal for vegetable noodles. If you don't have a spiral cutter, you can also serve spaghetti squash, simply bake it, scrape it out and the squash will take on the shape of spaghetti all by itself.
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5. Cut and arrange it nicely
As we all know, your eyes eat with you, and that goes double for children. So sometimes they like vegetables much better when they have a cool shape or are arranged like a smiley face. You can also cut out star-shaped or heart-shaped cucumbers using cookie cutters. Or you can put the vegetables on a sandwich and cut out a few heart-shaped pieces and place them next to the bread. Anything different than usual makes the vegetables more interesting.
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