Vegetables - some love them, others not so much. For International Eat Your Veggies Day on June 17th, I'm going to look at this versatile and delicious part of our diet today. How much vegetables do you need for health? And what do you do if your child refuses to eat vegetables? I once knew one and I'll tell you a few cool tricks to change the minds of little food snobs.

Eat-your-vegetables-on-day. It's actually a strange holiday, because vegetables should be on the table every day. But there is also a special Mother's Day, even though mothers should always be celebrated. So today we are going all out with vegetables. Raw vegetables, salad or a main meal made of vegetables are on the menu.

Luckily, this type of diet is a hit with our children, but Julian, our son's best friend, has always refused to eat vegetables. As an only child, he can choose from a lot of things, and that seems to be where the problem lies: he is veeeery picky and, like many other children, prefers pizza and chips. Pasta is OK too. Sweets, please. But vegetables, yuck, get rid of them!

Julian's mother Susi and I are good friends. She has often sat at our table and marveled at how our children devour raw vegetables and salad like locusts. She has asked me for advice a few times. Now I have shrugged my shoulders and knocked on wood long enough. Susi and I have done a bit of research to solve the problem. We have found a few great tips and tricks to make vegetables tasty for Julian. Have fun trying them out!

Children and vegetables: The basics

• The rule of thumb "five portions a day" applies to adults as well as children. One portion corresponds to the size of the child's hand. Two of the portions should be fruit and three vegetables.
• Children have more fun with vegetables when they are involved in the whole process, from shopping to growing sprouts to chopping vegetables and cooking.
• Children like to eat what they find visually appealing, so it's worth investing a little effort and offering a variety of raw food plates. This is particularly recommended for those starting a vegetable-rich diet, as one of the main reasons for not wanting to try vegetables is that they are not prepared in an appealing way.
• Patience is key – experiments have shown that a child needs to be offered something at least 35 times before he or she can say whether he or she likes it or not.
• If the child refuses, accept the decision and say instead, for example: "You don't like that? Oh, great, then give it to me, I really like it." This tactic is called artificial scarcity and works well with small children, but older children will see through it eventually.
• You are not doing yourself any favors if you say things like, “If you don’t eat your vegetables, you won’t get any candy.” Then the children will quickly see vegetables as a punishment!
• Instead, take the pressure off and use sophisticated preparations to create more and more positive vegetable experiences for your child. Enjoy eating vegetables yourself and your child will become curious. At some point, after x positive experiences, the penny will drop and the aversion will disappear. Then he will grab an unpeeled carrot and take a big bite.
  
  

  Delicious vegetables! That's what children like

Raw food

Whether as a snack with dip or for your breakfast box:
Vegetables such as carrots, peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini, kohlrabi or radishes can be attractively served on a plate, on a skewer or as slices.

Raw food offers many creative ways to introduce vegetables to children. In addition to beautifully arranged plates, you can also make great figures out of them for a change, which are almost too good to eat.

Vegetables from the oven and a small miracle

The next tip for vegetables in a child-friendly form is the exact opposite of raw vegetables: oven-baked vegetables. Here too, there are countless possibilities, just try out different types of vegetables! You will enjoy it yourself. 

Potatoes may be botanically a vegetable, but from a nutritional point of view they are more of a carbohydrate. We use the tuber as a back door to get into the topic and prepare several trays of oven-baked vegetables with Julian, the first of which consists of homemade chips and fries.

We cut the potatoes into very thin slices for chips and into thicker, rectangular strips for fries and then sprinkled them with oil, paprika powder, salt and dried herbs. The whole thing has to be placed on a baking tray and baked for about 20 minutes until crispy.

For the next tray, we added carrots and sweet potatoes and slowly but surely got our hands on zucchini, peppers and even eggplant. The miracle happened with the orange pepper: Julian had only ever nibbled on it raw. When he bit into the oven-baked pepper, he suddenly started making noises of delight and praising its delicious sweetness. Susi and I discreetly gave each other a high-five.

Almost all vegetables can be prepared in the oven, apart from cucumbers and lettuce. We like to serve the treats with a homemade dip. The little ones just dip everything in ketchup, but that's OK considering the rest of the healthy stuff. 

Vegetable spaghetti

With Spaghetti Napoli, you can easily hide chopped vegetables in the tomato sauce - it's an old trick.

But do you already know vegetable spaghetti?

They are not made from durum wheat, but from vegetables such as zucchini or carrots, and can be made quickly and easily using a spiral cutter. For a vegetable spaghetti meal, we usually leave out half of the real spaghetti. The raw vegetable spaghetti can then either be added to the pasta water for a minute or mixed directly with the finished spaghetti.

But you can also leave out the durum wheat pasta completely. Here is one of our favorite recipes:

3 m.-large zucchini
2 large carrots
4 m.-large tomato(s)
50 ml water
100 g tomato paste
1 tbsp herbs (8 herb mixture), frozen
2 pinch(s) of salt
2 pinch(s) pepper
1 tbsp olive oil

First we peel the zucchini and carrots and then cut them into long, thin strips using a spiral cutter. The tomatoes are washed and diced.
Don't be fooled by the amount of vegetable spaghetti: it looks like a lot, but a lot of liquid evaporates.

Now fry the sliced ​​zucchini and carrots in a pan with 1 tablespoon of olive oil until the water has evaporated from the vegetables. Then add the tomatoes and fry everything together briefly, deglaze with about 50 ml of water and simmer for 5 minutes on a low heat. In the meantime, mix the tomato paste with the herb mixture, salt and pepper and add everything to the pan with the vegetable spaghetti. Finally, heat everything for a minute, stirring constantly.

Bon appetit!

Puree

Another tip to make fruit and vegetables tasty for children is to puree them.
There are many options here, especially for fruit, served in the form of smoothies or fruit sauces or as homemade sorbet. Ice cream is always a good choice. 

Watermelon and cucumber ice cream is super refreshing and extremely healthy. It's not difficult to make and tastes really exceptionally delicious!

Recipe for delicious watermelon cucumber ice cream

For 8 portions we need:

80 ml water
100 g sugar
1/2 cucumber
500 g watermelon (this is how much the pure pulp should weigh)
2 tsp lime juice

Utils:
Ice molds and wooden sticks

We make a syrup from water and sugar by boiling it on the stove while stirring and then letting it cool. Then we cut the melon and cucumber into small pieces and put them in the blender with the cooled syrup and the lime juice. Turn the motor on and then freeze the puree. Enjoy frozen. Mmmmmhhhhhh….

Pureeing is also great with vegetables alone, of course - whether cold as gazpacho or warm as soup. Fresh herbs (or none :P) on top and a delicious oven bread. Depending on the color, soup is more for children who have already had good experiences with vegetables: for advanced users, so to speak. Otherwise, unfortunately, mom will have to eat the whole delicious broccoli cream soup herself, nomnomnom, and that would be a real shame! 

It tastes best without stress

And what about Julian? Well, of course he didn't shake off his aversion overnight just because we made it our mission to get used to it. The oven-baked vegetables were a real breakthrough in terms of peppers, but he didn't like them raw anymore. To his grandmother's delight, however, he nibbles a slice now and then. He doesn't eat the soup from a spoon, but from bread, which he generously dips into it. Creative lunch boxes were too much for Susi in the long run, especially after the teacher reported how he first showed her works of art to the amazed classmates and then generously distributed all the vegetables on them among them.

But recently, Susi and Julian had such a magical mother-son day. They played Princes of Catan and had a long and fantastic conversation about God and the world. During the conversation, Susi began to cut a cucumber into slices and put a little herb salt on top. She wasn't the only one who helped herself: Julian liked it so much that the two of them prepared a whole plate full of vegetables. He even ate the two pepper slices he had used to make vampire teeth.
Well, now I'm really hungry. I hope you enjoyed this article and that you can use one or two of the tips! Enjoy your meal and

Best regards
Your Nicole