Top Ten Tuesday--Eat your vegetables!

I have a confession to make: I have issues with vegetables. 

Yes, I know vegetables are good for you. It's not that I absolutely hate vegetables, it's just that I prefer eating other things. And I'm actually pretty good at preparing them, so I don't know why I have veggie issues. Maybe I need to pursue this in therapy. For the time being, I am coming up with ways to eat more vegetables.

Here are ten ways that I do (or I am planning to do) to get more vegetables in my diet :)

(1) Stir fry. This is probably my favorite way to eat vegetables, because they are part of the main dish! First I cook the meat, pour in some kind of sauce, then toss in some frozen vegetables and cook until they are hot, without letting them get soggy! Soggy vegetables=gross.


I'll even prepare stir-fried veggies as a side dish for my other Asian meals. Tasty :)


(2) Eat the vegetable first. This is something I've recently implemented. If we're having a vegetable side dish, I will eat that before I eat anything else. It's kind of like how you get the salad before the entree in restaurants. Plus, it keeps you from over-eating. Bonus. 


(3) Sneak sneak sneak. Chop veggies up into small pieces and hide them in sauces. So far, I have sneaked carrots into sloppy joes and spaghetti sauce. You can also sneak spinach or other vegetables into fruit smoothies for extra nutrition, but I haven't tried that yet.


If you don't want to spend time chopping things into tiny pieces, I highly recommend getting a food chopper like the one shown on the right! It's like a mini food processor. My brother is letting me borrow his while he's a missionary in Brazil. Unfortunately, he won't be getting it back. 


(4) Baba Ganoush. Yes, it sounds weird, but it's a tasty way to get some eggplant in your diet. I'll provide a recipe for it later :) It's a Middle Eastern eggplant dip. Yummy.


(5) Butter. Believe it or not, melting a little butter on your vegetables is good for you. The fat will help you absorb the nutrients in them. So go ahead, have some butter. It won't kill you.

(6) Salad dressing. Same goes for salad dressing. Of course, the challenge is finding a bottle without the additives. It's best to make your own, unless you have a husband who likes his salads "naked" like mine does. Then it will probably go to waste.  


(7) Don't overcook! I believe a lot of my issues with vegetables is that a lot of people tend to overcook them to the point of sogginess, which is nasty. 


(8) Make it exotic. This probably goes with the stir fry and baba ganoush post, but oh well. If you're tired of the standard veggie fare, try some exotic vegetable recipes. Indian and Chinese cuisine have some great vegetable dishes, for example. 


(9) Grill! I remember having some grilled zucchini at a Greek restaurant in Houston. Yummy! This is a trick I want to learn!

(10) Take a dip. Dip your veggies into ranch dressing (hopefully made from scratch), hummus, cheese...or whatever floats your boat. If it gets you to eat them, I say go for it.