Eat your Vegetables

“A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.”- Gertrude Stein

DietsInReveiw.com cites a list from WebMD of tricks to help you eat more vegetables. A healthy diet will include 3-5 servings (1 baseball each) of different colored vegetables every day.

1. Hide veggies inside dishes you love like. For example: mushroom & spinach inside lasagna or an omelet.

2. Add veggies to soup. Homemade soup with fresh vegetables and a canned base of chicken stock is wonderful.

3. Fill a salad with more than iceberg lettuce. Be wary of the dressing.

4. Try raw veggies in a low calorie dip

5. Go Italian – pasta & veggies are a great mix

6. Drink them – I could have had a V8!

7. Stuff them - roasted mushrooms with goat’s cheese, meatloaf inside a bell pepper, tuna fish inside a tomato.

8. Grill them – grilled veggies are oh so good. Or try broiling them in a oven with a little oil.

9. Skip the can, learn to cook them fresh properly – check out a cookbook for the correct way to steam, grill, cook, sauté your vegetable. It makes a difference. Asparagus can be disgusting when mushy but tasty when crisply steamed or microwaved.

10. Add to sandwiches & pitas & wraps.

11. Try baked & covered with cheese!

Bottom Line

Try buying mixed greens for more variety in salads. My wife loves to make Cobb Salad – we top mixed greens with whatever we have in the fridge: vegetables, meat, hard boiled eggs and some cheese cubes.

Vegetarian lasagna and Pasta primavera are delightful. One of our Christmas traditions is a Spinach Lasagna because it is Red, white and green.

We also love grilling vegetables – esp red peppers and zucchini.

We shave potatoes with a mandolin and make potato chips in the microwave.

Shredded zucchini and Spaghetti squash make great alternatives to pasta.

Be creative!