Healthy Recipe Collection

Vegetables are a great way to provide the necessary vitamins and minerals to your family. However, how many times have you told your children to eat their vegetables? Probably a lot.

For some reason, children have an aversion to vegetables. They will cry and sit for hours before you finally give in and send them from the table.

Vegetables do not always have to be the enemy. The key is to find a creative way to prepare them and your family will become vegetable lovers rather than vegetable haters!

If you think back, do you remember your mother dropping a soggy lump of broccoli on your plate and ordering you to eat it? Did it look appetizing? Probably not.

There are ways to make your children eat their vegetables. Broccoli, for example, is very high in both vitamins and minerals and there are various ways of preparing it. Good vegetable grill recipes usually turn out great and a lot of kids love these but what if that is not enough and your child still complains? Here are some tips:

Raw - you can put a plateful of raw broccoli in bite size pieces in the refrigerator, arranged around a little dish of salad dressing. Children love to dip their food and serving it in this way is something new for them. Leave the tips of the broccoli on the plate and either encourage your child to eat some or make a game of it. Grilled vegetable recipes are not the only way to prepare veggies.

If all else fails, bribery often works. Tell your child that they will get a special treat if they finish their vegetables. Make sure you have a treat for them afterwards.

Cheese - cheese naturally enhances the flavor of broccoli. When you add a cheese sauce, you are changing the flavor and adding texture. You may find your children eating their vegetables before anything else.

Lasagna is delicious with broccoli added. Smothering it in cheese can add to the flavor and disguise the broccoli. Children will be too busy enjoying the cheesy flavor to bother picking out the bits of broccoli. Vegetable pizza is another way of sneaking in broccoli. Nearly all kids love pizza so a healthy vegetable pizza recipe will produce something they associate with fun rather than veggies.

Try chopping it up. You can pre-cook the broccoli, cook it for a few minutes, and put it in the food processor. You can then add it to whichever recipe you are preparing and the kids will not know it is in there.

Shakes - make a milkshake using ice cream milk and a lot of chocolate syrup. Add the broccoli to the shake as you are blending it. The taste of the chocolate will hide the taste of the broccoli. Just make sure that the ice cream that you use has chunks of something in it, that is not hard to find in grocery stores.

Vegetables are high in essential nutrients, especially for growing kids, so it is great that there are so many ways to get them to eat their veggies!