What are your top strategies to “hide” vegetables in meals?

Question

Lisa Spencer, EdD, FNTP · Answer

This question just makes me smile. What are your top strategies to hide vegetables and meals? Well, we're pretty veggie forward in this house and I'm not sure I'm hiding vegetables, but I do seem to get them into most meals in a couple different ways. So, call it what you will. The one I think about with hiding is always throw some spinach and, of course, I needs. Any time, I do a, like, a ground beef, ground chicken ground turkey. So, I guess we're hiding the spinach and if we're doing like, sloppy joes, or even taco meat or meat loaf or hiding some veggies. Some spinach usually in on that another way to hide veggies, for kids, is really full and with dips, kids love to dip things. So if you're trying to get more veggies, in kids meal, having hummus having Tzatziki having Ranch, Anything that they can dip the veggies in your not hiding the veggies but you're just making the dip way, more exciting than refusing. The vegetables, this is a great time to introduce new vegetables and stir fries is another great time to introduce new vegetables. So try to throw something in there that you don't normally have see how it goes. I guess another way that I hide veggies is a make a lot of quick breads or snacks kind. Of carbohydrate protein, balance fueling nuggets with spinach and oats or black beans. So no refined sugars. No refined flours. And I guess I'm essentially hiding the veggies in there even though they are a main part of that snack, I had a client once tell me that their kids didn't eat anything green to which there's a great response add blueberries and all of a sudden that At smoothie or that green, muffin is now ground and nobody argues with a little bit of brown and tasty food. So, good luck with all incorporating your veggies,

Dr.Shawn Talbott · Answer

What are your top strategies to hide vegetables in meals? Well, I love to do it in spaghetti sauce. So if you're making a nice tomato sauce with a little bit of olive oil, a little bit of garlic and onions, you know, even just canned tomatoes. If you're going to, if you're going to go the quick route, sometimes you might have some meat in there. You might have something else to, you know, sort of sort of dress it up. That is a great place to hide vegetables. You can hide spinach in there, you can hide carrots, you can hide all kinds of things that you can shave up and the NATO sauce, once it's cooked down, it really takes on the taste of that tomato sauce. Oh, carrots are really easy. Kale is pretty easy, spinach is easy, but experiment. There's lots of things that you can hide in there and especially if you have a little bit of meat sauce going on there, it'll also take on that, that sort of umami, flavor of the, of the meat and the, whoever the vegetable hater is, will not even know there's extra vegetables in that sauce.

Tamara Freuman, MS, RD, CDN · Answer

What are your top strategies to hide vegetables and meals. So as a parent to two young children I deliberately do not hide vegetables and meals. I don't want my kids ever to think that vegetables are so heinous and horrible that people have to hide them in order to be tricked into eating them. And so we are very transparent about the vegetables in our meals, and my kids can choose to eat them or choose not to eat them. I try to make my vegetable meals as appealing as possible, so my kids will want to eat them, but I don't believe in hiding vegetables in meals. Having said that I think certainly when kids don't love the taste or texture of vegetables, there are ways to prepare them and mix dishes where kids might find them more palatable than others and that be more willing to eat them, which I think is different than hiding. It's more blending them in with other flavors and textures and so you know, for me soups are really one good way. You know, my kids would never necessarily sit down and eat fresh tomatoes. But when I use tomatoes to cook a soup or like a tortilla soup or a lentil soup, my kids are very happy to eat the vegetables in that soup. If one of my kids doesn't love fruit so much but when she's drinking a fruit smoothie, she's perfectly fine with it. And so these are really hidden fruits and vegetables. But they're certainly vegetables that are prepared in ways other than just sort of like fresh plain whole and raw. That might be more appealing to others. But I just I don't believe in hiding vegetables. It's just not my philosophy. Hope that helps

Abby Langer, RD · Answer

You're probably not going to like this answer, but as a dietitian, I don't really recommend hiding vegetables. And other Foods, it's just trickery, and if kids find out that you're doing it, it just it betrays their trust. I mean I can understand if you're worried that they're not getting enough vegetables, that's legitimate. Absolutely, but feeding them the vegetables that they will eat whether it's just Carrots and celery for like the next year, it's not going to hurt them. I'd rather you start them out on a road for a healthy relationship with food by not hiding vegetables, then trick them into eating the vegetables. You know, ground up in like carrot cake. I think you know focusing on five ten years down the road you want to set them up for a good relationship with food and You want them to start to appreciate the taste of vegetables. So if you can, you want to take them to the grocery store right now and get them to choose a vegetable to try? Make them active in preparing the vegetables with you, just give them a sense of ownership as a mom. I know this is unbelievably hard and I know you probably have a million other things to do but you know, I think in the long run, even if you do Do these things. A couple of times, it will make a difference.

Bob Seebohar, MS, RD, CSSD · Answer

Will I love this trying to hide vegetables in meals as a father and a sport dietitian? I love trying to come up with different scenarios on especially when my kids were little on how to squeeze in veggies. So my big thing is veggie smoothies, so, putting vegetables and blend them in smoothies super, super easy, love spinach, and kale and carrots, those type of things. Easy, easy, easy. You could also what I like to do is like dice them up, so maybe it's broccoli or spinach and really, really find icing, and I'll put that in sauce. Has. So if you're going to make like a meat spaghetti sauce can also put it in soup so I think the smaller you can dice vegetables so they're kind of out of sight out of mind from from people, then it's much easier to tolerate. You can also hide them in other things, like rice is as long as again. That's cut up pretty small so it's a really easy to kind of hide those veggies as long as you come up small, or you blend them in a blender.

Kitty Broihier, MS, RD · Answer

What are your top strategies to hide vegetables in meals? I've never really hidden vegetables except for one thing and that was zucchini that my kids did not like it when they were little, although now they do. And actually with mushrooms too, but I was never successful at hiding mushrooms. But with zucchini, what I did was shred it up very finely and add it to something I knew that they would already eat and they already liked, which were different casseroles, especially rice-based casseroles or pasta. So that would be one strategy and you can do that with a variety of vegetables, different summer squashes, carrots, things like that. Another technique you can use is to make a smoothie because you can pack a lot of veggies in a smoothie and as long as you have enough fruit in there or other flavorful components, the vegetables are harder to detect. Thirdly, you could focus on soups as a means to get a lot of vegetables in and if you blend up those soups, then those vegetables aren't as easy to pinpoint and can probably go down a little bit easier for people who are vegetable averse. And even if they're not, sometimes soup is an easy way to get things in.

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"What are your top strategies to “hide” vegetables in meals?"