Tip: Getting vegetables into your kid's meals

[ginaphan]

If your kids are like mine, getting them to eat vegetables is a challange. Most often than not, we lose the battle. And frantic parents like us will worry abt the lack of nutrition when they don't take their carrots, et al.

Here's what I do: Whenever I make anything that has gravy (like spaghetti), i would cut up and boil vegetables till soft and mash them. With spaghetti, I use carrots and cauliflower I add the mashed vegetables into the gravy (which also acts as a natural thickener). I use the water when boiling the vegetables as stock in the gravy. You can even freeze the stock for use at another time. You'll also end up with more gravy which is a $$ saver when you have hungry kids!.

Your kids won't know they are eating vegetables! And they will be wondering why you are smiling when they lick their platter clean.

[kwchang]

Great idea Gina, that provides the roughage in the diet. However, boiling destroys a lot of vitamins. Then again, a lot of vegetable recipies also tend to boil the veges to death :)

[flaminJ]

Here's what I do: Whenever I make anything that has gravy (like spaghetti), i would cut up and boil vegetables till soft and mash them. With spaghetti, I use carrots and cauliflower I add the mashed vegetables into the gravy (which also acts as a natural thickener).

Gina, boiling vegetables until they are soft will defeat the purpose of you having your kids taking vegetables. They don't contain the nutrients that they carry anymore. A suggestion is that blend the vegetables raw into pulp and keep in chiller. When you need to cook anything, then put a couple of spoons of the blended vegetables into the food raw. Having said that... make sure that your chiller is really cold when you store it or else another problem of food poisoning might come up as bacteria will multiply when they are out of safe zone.

Safe zone meaning chilled food at temperatures between 0 to 5 degrees C. Any temperature higher than that and there might be risk of poisoning as bacteria inside will multiply really fast and spoil the food. You might want to try out foods that are a bit sweet as kids like sweet based food. Try sauces with a sweet base like lemon sauce or sweet soya sauce if Asian cooking.


If you need further information on food prep, go to this website called www.epicurious.com. There are tons of recipes for you to experiment on. Good luck!

[Icehart]

Salad is a good choice..add mayonis yummy!
Oh yeah..perhaps some vegetable + prawn also not bad...also mee + sawi also not bad

hehe..
I like eating!!