Get Healthy by Hiding Veg in Your Food

Since the dawn of time, parents have struggled to get their kids (or particularly stubborn adult family members) to eat healthy food. Whether its broccoli, cauliflower, courgettes, mushrooms or whatever else, you soon learn when cooking for picky eaters that you can’t just steam up a plate of veg and expect them to eat it.

Back in the day, parents did one of two things: either they forced their children to eat these hated foods, creating lifelong negative emotional associations with these foods, or they just let the kids eat what they wanted. Today, parents have a secret weapon in this fight, and it comes in the form of hidden veggies.

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In fact, everyone who is concerned about their or someone else’s health are beginning to see the benefit of hiding veggies in their meals. A 2011 study conducted at Pennsylvania State University found they could get preschool aged children (aged 3 to 6) to eat twice as many vegetables and 11% fewer calories each day, just by adding pureed vegetables to their food. When we think about eating better, it’s all about getting more nutrition and cutting out calories, and it turns out that hiding veg in your meals does both.

Even though it is incredibly effective at making us healthier, hiding vegetables in recipes isn’t hard at all. In fact, it is remarkably easy. There are just two main ways of doing it – finely chopping and shredding veg or pureeing it – and both can help you and your family get healthy.

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Hide veg by chopping it up or shredding it finely

If you have excellent knife skills, all you have to do is chop up veg extremely finely. For everyone else, there are instruments like graters and mandolin slicers that can help you get tiny, tiny pieces of veg. These pieces should be small enough to practically disappear in the recipe.

Hide veg in mince-based meals

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To hide veg in hamburgers, meatballs or other mince-based meals, start by grating up carrot, squash, courgettes and just about any other veg. Sauté the veg in olive oil until it is very soft and translucent. Then add it to the mince, and cook the recipe as usual. The meat will mask the veggies, and your picky eaters won’t even notice them.

Hide veg in pasta meals

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Lasagne, macaroni cheese and other cheese-based pasta dishes in particular seem made for hiding veg. After all, stringy, tasty cheese and cheese sauces make everything taste better. As with the mince meals, start by shredding or chopping the veg up finely and sautéing it until it’s translucent. With macaroni cheese, you can skip the sautéing step, as everything will cook nicely in the oven. Then add the veg to the pasta before covering everything with a cheese sauce.

You can also boost the amount of veg in your pasta dishes by substituting half the pasta with thinly sliced courgette. Slice it into long, thin strips to beef up your spag bol, or slice it lengthways to create substitute pasta layers for your lasagne. You can also toss in handfuls of peas, spinach, onions and more veg. It may be harder to pass off as the “regular” recipe, but it is still tasty.

Hide veg by pureeing it

Pureeing veg is probably the sneakiest way to hide veg in your food, but it’s also one of the easiest, most effective way to do it, too. Simply pop a load of veg in a blender or use a stick blender to turn the veg into a sauce. This sauce can be popped into all manner of foods, and it can be frozen. So you can blitz a whole load of veg when the kids are out, and sneak it into their food when you cook, with them remaining none the wiser.

Hide veg in sauces

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The most obvious use of pureed veg is adding it to your sauces. Think of the puree like a stock cube: just pop it in to whatever sauce you’re making to give it an extra boost of flavour, without making it taste overly of veg. You can add it to tomato, cheese and just about any other sauce, and then just follow your recipe as normal.

If you really want to boost your veg intake, try adding both puree and tiny shredded or chopped veg to the sauce.

Hide veg in soups and stews

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As with the sauces above, you can add pureed veg to soups and stews to give them a depth of flavour and a boost in nutrition. Simply add the puree and cook as usual.

The best thing about hiding veg this way is the veg becomes part of the liquid of the soup or stew. That means, if your kids pick out the chunks of veg, they’ll still be getting a portion or two of veg, just by drinking the broth.

Hide veg in muffins, cakes and breads

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If you love baking, you may be surprised to learn you can hide veg in your tasty treats. But sweeter veg like courgette, squash or carrot can be slipped easily into muffin, cake and certain bread recipes, without really changing the taste or texture of the pastry.

Start by softening the veg if need be, then blitz it with a blender. It’s best to stick to just one of the vegetables above, so the flavours don’t compete too much. Once that’s done, pop in a portion of the veg when you’re mixing the wet ingredients together. Remember to cut down on other liquids, whether it’s the milk, oil or egg, so the batter isn’t too wet. Then bake as usual. The veg literally melts into the recipe, so you don’t taste it at all.

 

Hiding veg in meals is just a matter of getting the veg small enough to slip unnoticed into a meal. It does involve a little extra work, but the payoff – eating twice as many portions of veg and consuming 11% fewer calories every day – is well worth the effort.

So what do you do to make sure you and your family are eating well? Do you hide your veg? Get the kids involved in cooking? Let us know your top tips in the comments.