VEGGIES FOR KIDS

By Marie Dufour, RD - Getting our children to eat 5 servings of fruit and vegetables a day may seem a difficult task when kids say they don't like vegetables. Whether toddlers, kids, tweens or teenagers, there are ways to present our children with a positive experience. 

- Appropriate serving size: between 1 tablespoon per year of age for a toddler and ½ cup of cooked vegetables or 1 cup of raw vegetables for teenagers. (One cup is the size of a baseball)

- Variety of color: vitamins and minerals come in a variety of colors.  Make the plate colorful.

- Mixing it up: 5-a-day can be 3 fruits/2 veggies, or 3 veggies/2 fruit, and anything that adds up to 5 (good game for preschoolers).

     Some ways to add veggies in traditional dishes are:

- adding them on top of a pizza (less cheese, more tomato, mushroom, broccoli);

- making vegetable soup velouté (potato-leek, carrot-squash) topped with crunchy croutons;

- mixing them to pasta (pasta primavera), inside shepherd's pie (tomato sauce & peas), in fried rice (zucchini, sprouts), in chicken pot pie (spring mix) or tacos;

- adding a vegetable puree to mashed potatoes: it changes the color and it's fun;

- adding peeled (with a potato peeler) ribbons of carrots, zucchini, radishes, cucumber on the plate for decoration;

- crunchy dehydrated veggies (snow peas) are fun, but in moderation: fat and salt added!

Encourage the child to take just ONE bite of each and never force them to finish.  Repeat at every meal.  Eventually, kids eat their veggies.  Taste is a matter of habit.  Repeated exposure is the key to widening a child's taste.