Nutrition

Clever Ways to Sneak More Veggies Into Your Diet

Rynnie Cotter

Many struggle to eat the recommended daily 4-5 servings of fruit and veggies. If you’ve always eaten your veggies steamed without a lot of seasoning, you’re probably getting bored with them. Sounds like it’s time to add a little spice so you can sneak more veggies into your diet! 

There are many ways to make sure you get your recommended amounts of vegetables in your diet that rely on other flavors and textures in your cooking. Add some of these strategies to your diet and see how many more vegetables you can fit in your daily diet.

Remember that you don’t have to start with the vegetable you like the least: start finding ways to incorporate vegetables you already like or find acceptable, and then progress from there!

Woman with blond hair puts a bunch of carrots into her reusable tote bag.

5 Sneaky Ways to Eat More Veggies

Here are five sneaky ways that you can incorporate more vegetables into your diet.

Substitute Squashes for Noodles

Spiralizers can offer a great way to turn zucchini or yellow squash into noodle-like ribbons that can be used with your favorite pasta recipe. You can slice veggies like sweet potatoes or zucchini as thin layers in a lasagna-like dish that removes part or all of the pasta. This substitution lets you get much of the flavor of your favorite pasta dish with more nutrients.

Try Cauliflower as a Substitute for Pizza Crust, Rice, or Mashed Potatoes 

Cauliflower, once cooked, has a very mild flavor that works well as a substitute for many ordinary starches. There are cauliflower pizza crusts that rely on cheese and cooked cauliflower to hold up your favorite toppings.

You can use a food processor to roughly chop cauliflower to a rice-like consistency and use it instead of rice with your favorite dishes, or you can cook and blend cauliflower to a smooth consistency and add some butter or cheese to make a tasty mashed-potatoes substitute. 

Mix Puréed Veggies into Sauces

Whether you cook and blend up butternut squash, mash an avocado, or add a can of crushed tomatoes, when your dinner has a curry sauce, marinara sauce, or even a creamy cheese sauce, you can add in vegetables!

If your recipe calls for any kind of broth or water, see if you can substitute half of the liquid for a puréed vegetable; you may have to experiment with how this changes your sauce’s flavor, but adding a few nutrients is worth a subtle change.

Four spoons with purees on them. From left to right: carrot, sweet potato, potato, squash

Blend Light-Flavor Greens Into Smoothies

If you have a sweet tooth, smoothies are a great place to sneak in vegetables, especially leafy greens! Frozen spinach and kale can be added to smoothies easily, and when blended with strong fruit flavors like blueberries and bananas, you won’t taste the greens strongly.

Other great veggies to consider for some nice creaminess include avocados and sweet potatoes that have been cooked.

Add Veggies to Soups and Casseroles With Other Dominant Flavors

If you have a favorite chicken noodle soup or cheese potato casserole, experiment with adding just a few extra veggies. For example, up the carrot and celery count on the chicken noodle soup or make it a cheese, potato, and broccoli casserole. Yes, these elements are likely to shift the flavor, but soups and casseroles are very malleable (unlike, say, adding broccoli to a bread recipe!) and can often handle some major substitutions.

When searching for recipes online based on your tastes, add a vegetable or two to the search bar and see if someone has perfected a great recipe that includes your chosen ingredients.

The key takeaway here is not that you have to love vegetables, but that veggies can pretty quietly and cleverly join your favorite foods. What’s more, over time our tastes change, so eating more vegetables alongside your favorite flavors from other food groups actually helps you to enjoy their flavors themselves.

As you use a workout app or a health app to get into shape, your choice to incorporate vegetables into your diet will help you to achieve your fitness goals! If you’re looking for an app to help you find workouts that get results, check out Sworkit today!

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