Hi Andie! I just wanted to pop by and say that I hope you are hanging in there with the job stuff, and that you find yourself falling into a better and more healthy opportunity much sooner than you anticipate ✨✨
I also have to ask: do you have any creative ways that you prepare veggies or mix them into other foods? I’m trying to do this more lately to improve my overall health (and of course set an example for my kids haha)
Flannyyyyy my angel!!!! I'm hanging in there!! How are you doing these days?? What are you up to lately??
I think it's easier to get adults into eating more vegetables, but if you're also working with kids it's tougher!! 🤔 If you want to just go for it the sneaky way, I'd start with blending them into pasta sauce! I did this for my mom and brother when I stayed with them a couple months ago after my mom's surgery, because they both are way more meat and potatoes than me and do not get enough fiber in my opinion lmao. I made a couple of different pastas where I blended in zucchini, celery, and carrot in with the tomato sauce. They fill out the sauce well and it's hard to tell the difference with other tomato-based sauces lol. (See hidden veggie pasta sauces like this one!!)
I think it's also easy to supplement staples by rounding them out with veggies. If you make rice, grated carrot cooks down nice and soft into the rice with like no noticable flavor or texture difference (e.g. timman bil jizar). You can also supplement part of a mashed potato dish with cauliflower instead.
If you want the veggies to stand on their own though and be a noticable part of the meal/side, it probably depends on how you guys usually eat!! If you guys are more meat and potatoes people, then I would start by loading the veggies up with meat, cheese, and fried flavors first before trying to transition into other methods of preparation.
I'm thinking like sweet potato fries, smothered cauliflower baked-potato-style, broccoli and cheese, fried veggie fritters, and roasted bacon brussels sprouts to start with. Making them available as part of every meal I think is the most important part of regularizing eating them!! Then, once everyone is more accustomed to eating veggies with every meal and likes the flavor, you can try some of the more interesting and elaborate methods of prep lol.
But lemme know how you guys usually eat!! Like I said, what works and what will stick is largely dependent on you & your tastes!!
Edit: if you're just looking for interesting and novel ways to prep veggies and don't care about all the sneaking around, then here's the tag for some of my faves lol.
