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We all know we should be adding more vegetables to our diet to improve our overall health and well-being as well as to maintain a healthy bodyweight. However, not all of us love to eat vegetables. In fact, some of us really don’t like them at all. If the idea of sitting down to a salad or a large plate of steamed veg turns you off, it might be difficult to find ways to get your five a day.
Most of us had the experience of sitting at the dining table as a child being faced with a mound of broccoli or peas and being told that we weren’t allowed to go and play until they were all gone! It’s enough to put you off your greens for life! However, it doesn’t need to be that way. If you can’t face the idea of boiled cabbage or carrot sticks with your lunch or dinner, you need to find a better way to sneak those essential vitamins and minerals into your daily meals.
Luckily, there are quite a few ways that you can cleverly add vegetables into your diet every day without really noticing. As a tip for parents, this trick works just as well for children too, so if you have little ones who absolutely refuse to eat their greens, try these three delicious ways to get your veggies each day.
1. Secret Vegetables In Regular Dishes
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One of the best ways to sneak vegetables into your meals without really tasting the difference is to add them into your regular dishes where they won’t be noticed. Some of the best ways to hide veg in your meals is to add them to pasta sauces like Bolognese or to hide them in cottage pies where the taste of the meat will overpower them. Tomatoes are the obvious choice to hide to these kinds of dishes, but you can also add courgettes, carrots, onions and peppers too by dicing them very finely or even by pureeing them and adding them to the sauce mix. If anything, it’ll only improve the flavor and even the pickiest eater won’t have any problem in getting an extra portion of vegetables this way.
2. In Juices And Smoothies
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Juices and smoothies are very popular right now, and you can get into this trend while getting some extra veggies into your diet. While fruit smoothies and juices are probably always going to be your first choice, there are lots of vegetables which work very well when combined with fruit. Spinach, for example, works very well in a green apple and pear juice, while carrot can be added to a berry smoothie easily without you noticing the difference. If you’re planning on juicing stringy vegetables like wheatgrass or kale, you’ll need to make sure that you’ve chosen a juicer which can handle it. View this post now to find reviews of the best juicers on the market today for handling vegetables as well as fruit.
3. Use Cauliflowers To Their Best Advantage
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Cauliflowers are amazingly versatile vegetables. Thanks to their relatively bland taste and the fact that they can easily be mashed, they work very well with potatoes and rice to add extra vegetables into your diet without really noticing the difference. If you’re making mashed potatoes, you can swap half with mashed cauliflower. When you’ve added cheese, butter, salt and pepper, you’ll hardly be able to tell the difference, and it’s a lot healthier. You can do the same if you’re making a topping for cottage pie. Cauliflower also works well with rice. You can grate some cauliflower and cook it with fried rice for a more nutritious side to accompany Chinese, Thai or Indian food. It’s delicious with curry!
These are just three of the best ways to incorporate more vegetables into your everyday diet. Although it may not seem easy as first, you’ll soon find that if you use your creativity and imagination, you’ll be able to create some exciting meals which contain hidden vegetables and which can help to increase your 5 a day total. Once you start adding veggies to your meals, who knows – you might learn to love them!
