Feeding Vegetables to the Children

One of the great challenges for parents is to get the children to eat their vegetables. I often refused vegetables as a child. Now payback has come in the form of my two adorable children/zombie controllers. Jacob is especially suspicious of any food that is colored green. Quite often he will declare the green item to be "spinach" and claim that he does not like it. We must show him some Popeye videos. But I digress. Unfortunately for them, the children's control over their parents is not absolute and we have discovered a few ways to feed them things they'd rather not eat.

Most effective is hiding vegetables in other food. Once we added diced yellow peppers to scrambled eggs--virtually invisible to Jacob, he ate them with gusto. He loves sweet potatoes, so we add in some finely chopped green beans and hope he doesn't notice the offending color. It's easy to hide some salsa (which is nothing but a Cuisinarted vegetables) wrapped in a tortilla or cooked in a quesadilla. I wonder if this is why they started putting lettuce and tomato on hamburgers and other sandwiches.

Things that are naturally vegetabled are also good to fool them. Like spaghetti sauce. As long as it isn't too chunky, the kids love it. Jacob won't usually take toppings off a pizza unless they have the offending color. Casseroles also can be loaded with vegetable goodness. Another favorite of Jacob's is a skillet dinner called Tamale Pie (from the The Best 30-Minute Recipe cookbook linked below too) that has onions and tomatoes in abundance but not in appearance. Cheese and beef are a good cover flavor for veggies.

Good luck and let us know if you have any suggestions on how to feed vegetables to children. Remember: Just because you're low on brains, that doesn't mean you have to be low on ideas.