Hiding Vegetables for Children

03/31/2011 - 18:29
LAmom

My 4 year old loves pasta, so I buy her the vegetable pasta made from spinach, broccoli and carrots.

If your kids love pasta like my little girl does, you can puree almost any veggie and mix it with tomato sauce to make sure they eat their veggies at the same time. This works really great with pureed carrots. I also noticed she likes to mix salty with sweet (I've seen her dip her pasta in orange juice!), so another thing to try mixing the veggie puree with apple sauce.

I'd love to get more healthy pasta recipes from other moms. Thanks!~

More tips for hiding Vegetables for children

Submitted by Good for Growth on Fri, 04/01/2011 - 10:11.

Hi there and thank you for sharing these great tips with us.

 

It can really be difficult to get children to eat their veg and there are so many tricks you can apply to help you do this (although not all of them will work for everybody!)

-Have you tried just leaving bowls with pieces of cut up raw fruit and vegetables lying around the house? I know that this is not the best way to teach yur children about meal times and table manners, but many children around the age of 2 refuse fruit and vegetables because they are testing their parent's authority. So its a good idea to leave food lying around to try and find out if this is the case or if they simply don't like the taste of the veg. Many parents find out that their child actually like fruit and veg, but won't eat it at the dinner table! To make it a bit more exciting you can even include a tasty hummus dip.

- If the taste is the problem, then mixing the veg with some other food your toddler loves is always a good idea. For example you can hide carrots in carrot cake (I don't know many children that don't love this), or banana in banana bread. If your child is a meet lover try mixing little pieces of veg with some ground beef. Mixing some other veg with your potato mash is also very popular with kids (sweet potatoes, broccoli or cauliflower all work great!)

- If your kid is a cheese lover, how about a veg 'au gratin', ie. topped with some cheese and baked in the oven.

- Wrapping it or sandwiching it are also a great way of including a few veg to any snack

Hope these tips help. Good luck and let us know if these tips work our for you.

 

New Hidden Recipe

Submitted by LAmom on Thu, 01/19/2012 - 23:01.

Thanks for the tips. I had one success yesterday with hiding carrots in Pizza Bagels.

 

You make a puree from organic carrots and mix 2/3 puree to 1/3 pizza sauce, then you layer that on top of a whole wheat bagel, sprinkle it with part-skim low fat mozzarella cheese, and broil it for 4 minutes. Both kids loved it! It's not much puree but it's a start. I also tried mixing cauliflour with mayo and yokes for deviled eggs, but they wouldn't try it. May work for some other mom, though. I like the idea of veggies with ground meat. I'll try that next.

 

Thanks again!