Eat Your Veggies

One of our goals for this year is to eat healthier foods. To me, healthy means homemade (and ideally homegrown) so that you know what goes in your food and you know that you are eating quality food. Healthy also means the dreaded V-word. Vegetables.

For the first 8 years of my life, I lived on my paternal grandparents' farm and they raised all kinds of vegetables. Okra, cucumbers, tomatoes, corn, collards, field peas, green beans and yellow squash to name a few. While there were always a few vegetables I didn't like, my parents were both diligent about making sure we at least tasted our vegetables to make sure we didn't like them (and to at least get some nutrition from the bit we did eat). So, I have never had a huge problem eating most vegetables and I'm finding, as an adult, my tastes are changing and I like more of the vegetables that I hated as a kid.

Fenrirwulf, however, is a different story altogether. As far as eating the vegetables is concerned, he likes what he likes and that's what he wants to eat. His parents didn't really force him to eat things he might not like, like mine did. Sometimes this makes it hard to plan a nutritious meal because there are things he doesn't like or doesn't want to try (like okra).

So, what's a girl to do? My answer to that is to hide the veggies in whatever you are cooking.

Last night, I made what we normally call Pasta Bake for our lunches this week. We combine spaghetti sauce, ground beef and rotini and top it with cheddar cheese and bake it in the oven. When I do things with commercially canned spaghetti sauce, I like to add things to it to make it seem more homemade. So, to one can of Hunt's spaghetti sauce, I added 1 pound of browned ground beef (browned in olive oil), an onion, 3 cloves of garlic, 2 cans of diced tomatoes, 2 large carrots and some spices (salt, pepper and italian seasoning). I looked through our freezers and our cabinets to see what other veggies we could find (to both stretch out the pasta for more meals and also add some more nutrients to our diet). In one of the freezers, I found a half bag of yellow squash (which is a veggie we both like but is not something we would normally put in spaghetti). So, I took it out, defrosted it, diced it and added it to the sauce. I dumped the sauce into a baking dish and added about a pound and a half of macaroni (I did not pre-cook the macaroni), a cup of part-skim mozzarella cheese and a quarter cup of shredded parmesan cheese and baked it all in the oven for about an hour.

Fenrirwulf saw me put the squash in and kind of made a face, but I carried through and put it in anyway.

Today, at lunch, I ate the pasta for the first time. As far as I could tell, the squash had broken down and become lost in all the pasta. I couldn't really taste the squash at all, either, but I knew it was in there. I think that if he had not seen me put it in the sauce pot, Fenrirwulf would have never known the squash was there.

Now I wonder what else I can make and hide some veggies in so that we are getting a more diverse diet. It may be worth looking through both The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids' Favorite Meals and Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food .