Your mom always told you to stop pushing your broccoli around your dinner plate and sighed when you said you hated carrots. You suffered through way too many family dinners with gross vegetables lurking next to the steak and chicken. Now you’re all grown-up (supposedly, anyway) and you know you should be eating more of the green stuff. But for some crazy reason, at the end of a long work day, you’d rather order a pepperoni pizza or some Chinese food. There are some legit health reasons to enjoy a giant pile of veggies on a regular basis: you have a decreased chance of getting cancer or heart disease, among other illnesses. According to the Food Guide in Canada, the amount of servings of vegetables that you should be consuming is seven or eight. Yikes. That’s a whole lot of veggies if you’re just not all that into them. But don’t despair. Here are 11 ways to actually eat your vegetables. You can get through this.
11 Make A Veggie Smoothie
Let’s not call it a green smoothie. That’s enough to make you gag if you already hate green vegetables, right? Green smoothies are so popular these days for one simple and totally brilliant reason: you don’t have to eat your veggies because you can drink them. Done and done. If you really hate anything green, then make a breakfast smoothie with a banana, the berries of your choice, a handful of spinach or kale, whatever milk you drink, and a scoop of canned pumpkin puree. The pumpkin will totally mask the green color and the smoothie will be gone before you even know it.
10 Get Dip Crazy
Everyone loves hanging out with their friends and gossiping over a huge bowl of guacamole and tortilla chips, or devouring the cheese and artichoke dip at their holiday work party. Dipping is just plain fun. As it turns out, if you make a bunch of pretty and super healthy dips, you can eat vegetables without even realizing that you’re eating them. Pick some raw veggies that don’t have super strong flavors – celery, yellow, and orange peppers, and cucumbers are some good choices – and bring a dip to work. You already know your stomach rumbles like clockwork at 3 or 4 p.m. every day and now you’ll have healthy snacks.
9 Try One New Veggie A Week
Easy, right? You can totally do this. It doesn’t matter if you absolutely hate cooking and never do it or if you’re a gourmet chef (at least in your own eyes). Think about it: there are four weeks in a month, which means you’ll only be trying four new vegetables a month, which is a super small number when you break it down. You don’t have to get super exotic but you can if you want. Even basic veggies like cauliflower or a certain type of lettuce count if you never eat them. They’re new to you and that’s what matters.
8 Make Yummy Vegan Meals
The vegan movement is having a moment and you don’t have to worry about gross, bland, weird food. You can find a number of popular and trendy vegan food blogs and cookbooks to get inspiration from. Making cooking vegan food a priority is an easy way to up your veg intake since, well, that’s what these kind of meals are all about. For recipe inspiration, check out Angela Liddon’s blog Oh She Glows or Ella Woodward’s Deliciously Ella. You can find all kinds of delicious meals from vegan chili to tomato pasta to stir-fries and in no time you’ll be whipping up simple veggie-rich meals.
7 Add Avocado To Everything
If you’re not obsessed with avocado and enjoying it on a daily basis, what are you waiting for? Even if you’re not into anything green you can’t help but adore avocado and it’s super creamy texture. It’s not a vegetable, weird as that sounds – technically, it’s a fruit – and it’s beloved for its healthy fats. You can add avocado to any meal you eat and cover up the weird veggie taste. Add spicy hot guac to a stir-fry or enjoy cubes of avocado on a huge salad or veggie pasta dish. You won’t even notice anything but your BFF avocado. It’s a healthy idea, too: experts say that eating Vitamin A-rich vegetables like greens with avocado means you’ll get more Vitamin A.
6 Make Pesto
Pesto is usually made with basil and parmesan cheese and pine nuts, but you don’t have to follow that boring formula. Go ahead and replace the basil with any green vegetable you can think of (spinach is a good idea) or even a non-green vegetable. There are no rules in the kitchen, after all. You could use red or golden beets or even red peppers and your pesto would be a beautiful, rich colour. You eat with your eyes, as they say. Add unique pesto to pasta, brown rice or even quinoa, and all you have to do is add a protein and dinner is done.
5 Roasting Is Your Friend
It’s just a fact of life that boiled vegetables tastes absolutely disgusting and roasted vegetables taste absolutely amazing. You can literally take any veggie that you typically would hate to eat and roast it, and your mind will be changed in seconds. Get spice-crazy and add anything from garlic powder to chili powder to sweeter spices like nutmeg and cinnamon. An amazing vegetable to roast in the oven is fennel. It’s not a super popular veggie but it should be: when roasted, it’s got an amazing sweet taste that won’t remind you of the broccoli you pretended to eat as a kid.
4 Make A Big Salad
Remember the Seinfeld episode when Elaine was obsessed with The Big Salad at the diner that the gang usually went to? You can copy her great idea and make your own big salad for work lunches. The best part is if you make it Sunday night or Monday morning, you’ll have enough salad to last you a few days. And nothing is better than planning ahead and not having to think about what to have for lunch. This plan only works, though, if you add more than just plain lettuce. Cover up any bitter vegetables with a tangy dressing made of balsamic vinegar, Dijon mustard, and a bit of sweetness like maple syrup, and you’ll be downing your vegetables in no time.
3 Order Veggies In Restaurants
So you’re out to dinner with your best friends on Saturday night and the last thing you want to do is eat some vegetables. You want some girl time and gossip, and more than a few drinks. It’s time for nachos and onion rings and burgers, right? Sure, order the burger but get a side of vegetables. Once you get into the habit, it won’t feel like such a big deal and you’ll be consuming them on a daily basis without a second thought. Your friends will be impressed and your body will thank you. The best part of all? Someone else is doing the cooking.
2 Ask Your Mom For Advice
Your mom is probably an awesome cook. Ask her for some healthy vegetable-focused recipes or advice on how she forced herself to start eating vegetables. She might be able to help – that’s what moms are for, after all. She’ll definitely be more than happy to help and might even offer to show you a few easy tricks for cooking the stuff, which you definitely want and need. If your mom tends to burn whatever food she touches, maybe your dad was the one who was in the kitchen when you were growing up, or maybe you have a friend who’s a chef, either professionally or just for fun. Either way, you can find someone in your social circle to help out.
1 Cook Up Some Oatmeal
All you have to do is log onto Instagram and chances are someone that you’re following has posted a beautiful bowl of oatmeal that they ate for breakfast this morning. Follow in their footsteps and enjoy some oatmeal – but not just for breakfast. You can make this healthy grain for your morning meal as well as lunch or dinner, and just top with whatever veggies you want, from sweet potatoes to zucchini to peppers. You get bonus points if you make your bowl pretty and Instagram-worthy. If you start having more fun with creative ways to eat your vegetables, you might actually start to like them. Baby steps, right?
sources: healthyeating.org, foodincanada.com, whfoods.com
