We all know that vegetables are good for you but sometimes getting our kids to eat as many veggies as we’d like can be challenging. Depending on your child’s age and they should be consuming anywhere from 1 cup to 3 cups according to choosemyplate.gov. Today, 9 out of 10 people in the United States do not get the proper amount of vegetables, according to The State Of The Plate report. My kids are pretty great about eating their veggies on the whole and lots of people ask me how to get their kids to eat more veggies. Here are some useful tips from Melissa d’Arabian and then some more tips for getting kids to eat more veggies from me too!
Melissa d’Arabian Shares Tips For How To Get Kids To Eat Veggies
Birds Eye has partnered with Melissa d’Arabian, celebrity chef, mom of four, and host of FoodNetwork.com’s web series The Picky Eaters Project, to make a difference and help moms with the dinnertime dilemma of getting kids to eat more veggies. Birds Eye frozen vegetables helps mom by providing nutritious, tasty veggies that kids will love. Together, Birds Eye and Melissa are combining their expertise to share how to get kids to eat veggies and like them! She shares some great recipes for bringing out the natural sweetness in veggies to get kids to start enjoying them more.
I love Melissa d-Arabian’s easy veggie filled recipes and I hope your kids do too! Birds Eye continues to make eating more vegetables a reality by showing families how to fill half the plate with veggies in fun and simple ways moms and kids will both like. By providing parents with more than 40 unique vegetable blends year round at affordable prices, Birds Eye continues to make it easy to serve veggies.
How do you get kids to eat veggies?
Well using cleverly disguised veggie filled recipes as Melissa d-Arabian suggests is one way. Here are several more ides for getting kids to eat veggies.
Tout Veggies- They Make You Healthy And Strong!
Well, to me, it comes down to sharing with your kids that veggies are good for them. When my kids were little I simplified it and told them about Popeye and how he eats spinach to get strong. I told my kids the same goes for them- eating veggies makes them stronger- maybe not as fast as in the cartoon but over time.
Just Try Veggies
It also comes down to providing ample veggies at your meals and on their plates. My kids know that they have to eat veggies if they want any dessert. If they chose to pass on dessert, they still have to have a few bites of each kind of veggie because it is good for them and because I worked hard to cook it for them. They understand even when they are not excited about it.
Visit a Farmer’s Market
Take your kids to a farmer’s market and let them explore all of the different types of delicious produce. It can be fun to pick out weird-looking ones or fruits you’ve never heard of, and it’s the perfect way to get kids to eat produce and new foods! If there is a farm nearby, see if you can visit and take advantage of pick your own crops.
Plant Edibles
Summer is all about gorgeous weather, so get outside as a family and enjoy it! Planting a garden together is a wonderful way to not only spend quality time with your kids, but it’s also the perfect opportunity to get kids to eat produce and introduce them to a variety of fruits and vegetables. Similar to cooking food, planting summer produce will make kids much more receptive to tasting it later on. If you don’t have time or space for a garden try a couple of pots of fresh herbs.
Cook Together
Bringing kids into the kitchen is one of the best ways to get them to try new foods and expand their palates. When kids are involved in the creation of a meal, they’ll be excited, proud and much more likely to try it than if it were simply placed in front of them. Seeing foods like avocados, which many kids don’t love, turned into delicious guacamole served with tortilla chips can make certain foods seem a lot less scary.
Provide Options
If your child rejects asparagus, don’t assume that he or she won’t ever eat anything green. Exposing kids to a wide variety of fruits and vegetables allows them to discover what they do and don’t like; odds are, if they try enough different types, they’ll find a few winners. Giving kids a choice of vegetable or fruit at mealtime provides them with more say in the matter, which can help encourage healthier eating.
Give Produce Some Kid Appeal
Most kids will turn up their noses at a big bowl of broccoli, but serve that broccoli with a side of queso dip or ranch dressing and that broccoli will disappear in a heartbeat. When vegetables are made fun with dips and spreads, or incorporated into kid-pleasers such as pizza, tacos or quesadillas, most kids won’t be so opposed to them. You can also present them in fun ways. My kids love eating broccoli because it is fun to “eat miniature trees”.
Slip Diced Veggies Into Favorite Dishes
Cooking veggies in ways your children will enjoy them is also important. Whether it is slipping in chopped up veggies to sauces and soups or providing fun dipping sauces for the veggies.
Here are some photos of my the way I like to chop veggies and cook them up with our pasta sauces. I like to use the Birds Eye packages that have all the onions and colorful peppers already sliced up and ready to cook. I just saute some ground beef, add in my veggies, cook for a bit and then add in my pasta sauce for an easy one dish full of veggies.
My kids also like to eat frozen veggies! My daughter LOVES frozen peas and corn right out of the Birds Eye bag. I’m not kidding when I say that I catch her snacking on them in the kitchen after school!
Veggies can even be served at unexpected times like breakfast with omelettes or casseroles or dessert with pumpkin chocolate chip cookies!
What are your best tips for getting kids to eat more veggies?
I was selected for this opportunity as a member of Clever Girls Collective and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own.
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Corina Ramos says
Thanks for sharing these tips with us Melissa. I had a hard time getting my kids to eat veggies when they were little. We used to tell them it would give them “running power”. So after they’d eat they would play outside and race each other to see who was the fastest :).
I’m happy to say that my daughter is doing a better job than I did. Her kids love their veggies, The 6 month old was introduced to carrots and he went to town!
Great suggestions. Gladly passing this on! Enjoy the rest of your week.