At our core we are all just toddlers aren’t we? If I could happily, and healthfully exist on a diet of macaroni and cheese with a side of ice cream I would. Sadly that isn’t the way the world works. So while parents will often stress themselves over ways to sneak more vegetables into their children’s diets, it’s rare that they take the time to look at their own to see if their own vegetable intake is really “measuring up”.
When coaching clients through my Team Spark program, it’s extremely rare for me to find someone who is already eating a minimum of five servings of veggies/day. We all know consuming vegetables is one of the best ways to improve your health and yet so few of us do it. Why? Because we still want that mac’n’cheese and ice cream instead.
That’s why I recommend people sneak vegetables in foods in different ways. In ways that get you eating your 5-1o a day without you feeling like all you do is eat lettuce. Here are my three favourite tips for sneaking extra veggies into your diet:
1. Hide it in the food you are already eating.
One of my favourite ways to do this is with carrots in lasagne. You can put a good cup or more of shredded carrot in your lasagne meat sauce and you’ll barely even notice it when you eat while still giving you a full extra serving of veggies as you go. A few other options are adding chopped spinach to soups (it shrinks down and nearly disappears!), adding zucchini into your pasta sauces (much like the carrot it nearly disappears, but it more watery so you will have to cook the sauce a bit longer into order for it to thicken up), and by adding zucchini to baked goods (like chocolate cake!).
2. Add them to your smoothies
I really can’t explain why, but baby spinach just “POOF!” disappears in smoothies if you mix it well enough. You can’t taste it, and if you use brightly coloured fruits, you can’t see it either. I prefer to buy fresh organic baby spinach in a value pack, and then toss it in a freezer bag and freeze it. That way I don’t have to worry about it going bad before I use it and it blends into smoothies even better that way. It’s a super easy way to get in two full servings of greens without having to chew a thing!
3. Make veggies more fun!
And call me weird (it’s okay, I’ve embraced it), but making your veggies look like noodles is fun. I’m obsessed with my spiralizer. I only wish I had a 
bigger one so I could #SpiralizeAllTheThings, but for now I’m limited to small zucchini, cucumbers, carrots, etc. The problem with a spiralizer, is unless you are super creative you will use it for two things, and two recipes and that’s it. Robert Rose publishing recently sent me the cookbook “150 Best Spiralizer Recipes” which was pretty awesome since it arrived at the height of zucchini season, and my parents garden seems to be cranking out zucchini like crazy! They also have cucumbers too so I was excited to get the chance to play with my spiralizer making some new recipes. In the book there are recipes for so many different kinds of spiralized vegetables besides my three standards. They also use parsnips, apples, celery root, sweet potato, bell peppers, cabbage, broccoli stems (<– so smart! nobody ever knows what to do with those pesky stems!), and much more.
But they go beyond just sharing recipes, they explain how to prepare each different type of veggie, how much each veggie produces once spiralized, the best types of cuts to make, basically everything you could ever need to know about making vegetables noodles.
So far I’ve made Beef Bolognese with Zucchini noodles which was delicious. I haven’t tried it, but I think if you are really worried about missing the
pasta portion of the dish, I would experiment using 1/2 spaghetti and 1/2 zoodles (spiralized zucchini). I love zoodles, but I think I might try the 1/2 and 1/2 idea next time since I did miss the real noodles a bit. I’ve also made the Ultimate Spiralized Greek Salad which had spirialized cucumber in it. This one was super yummy. I am a pretty big fan of salad with out lettuce. Don’t get me wrong, I like lettuce, but I think them the loser of the
ingredients for me. Topped with a homemade vinaigrette this was so good!
There you have it – my three tips for sneaking more real veggies (real meaning not powdered) into your diet. Do you have another tip you love for sneaking more veggies in? I’d love to hear about them in the comments!
Disclosure: This posts contains affiliate links.
I was provided with a complimentary copy of 150 Best Spirializer Recipes via Robert Rose publishing, all opinions are my own.