Get Cunning With Your Veg

You’ve got more chance of getting veg into some kids as you have of becoming the Queen. Children are clever, you see – they can spot a vegetable from a mile off. God forbid you ever miss a lump when blending their favourite ‘orange soup’ and they realise it’s full of veg or they realise that red stuff in bolognese is actually tomatoes, and please no one mention that potatoes are actually a vegetable.

Kids can hate yet need veg in equal measure, so you’ve got to find a way around it – make funny faces out of veg (tip: spiralised carrot makes excellent curly ginger hair), sieve out lumps after blending or give them a sticker for their chart every time they eat all of the veg on their plate.

Or you could get grating. Grated veg is much harder to spot. Kids might be clever, but not quite clever enough to identify grated carrot in a bolognese or shepherd’s pie. Grating is a great (pun most definitely intended) way to sneak extra veg into kids’ meals, and you can try the same trick with these healthy and tasty recipes too:

After-school snacks shouldn’t just mean biscuits, but they also don’t just have to mean fruit. This time of day, when the kids are starving after their day but there’s still a few hours until dinner, is the perfect opportunity to get cunning and get some extra veg into them. Hopefully, they’ll be so hungry they won’t even notice.

Serving up a batch of these little carrot and onion bhajis from Andrew in the Kitchen after school will give them a taste of their favourite weekend takeaway treats, but with a whole lot more goodness. The recipe’s easily adaptable, as you can use any veg that you like and leave out the spice if your little ones’ taste buds aren’t quite ready to handle it.

These vegetable fritters with a smoky salsa dip from Anna Banana are another good post-school snack idea to mix things up a little, but also grate (sorry, we can’t help ourselves) to serve up at a grown-up dinner party – although you might need to adjust your seasoning and dip to suit different tastes.

The recipe includes courgettes, carrots and potatoes, but again, you could add in other veggies, like peas and sweetcorn. And consider a yoghurt or sour cream-based dip with a few herbs as an alternative to the salsa for little ones, or leave out the spice if you prefer.

In the same way that chocolate automatically tastes better when it’s Easter egg-shaped, pasta immediately tastes better when it’s coloured. For a super-healthy meal, tell your kids they’re having green pasta and serve up courgetti with chicken and pesto – and extra chunks of veg if you fancy your chances.

My Fussy Eater has a simple but lovely recipe that’s packed with taste for this dish, and we reckon you can just about get away with passing it off as special green spaghetti. If you’re not so sure, try a half’n’half approach – cook up a pasta sauce and serve with half your usual amount of spaghetti, as well as a little courgetti. Call it monster snot if you have to – some kids are more likely to think it’s a good idea to eat that than veg.

Burgers, meatballs and koftas are also excellent for hiding grated veg in. We’re big fans of this recipe for hidden veg-packed lamb koftas from Hungry Healthy Happy, and you can easily apply a similar principle to other recipes.

For example, make hidden veg burgers by mixing mince with a little grated onion and carrot, plus seasoning, before shaping into patties and frying for a few moments on each side in your Tefal Thermo-Spot. For meatballs, simply change the shape. Imagine if you could get veg-packed meatballs in a homemade sauce with courgetti in the kids. Reckon it’s impossible? Try it.

Sceptical about putting grated veg in a cake? Well, just think about carrot cake. People have eaten it for years without ever questioning the fact it has shredded vegetables in, so why should it be any different for something like beetroot? It shouldn’t.

Beetroot adds a gorgeous pink colour to cake, as well as a beautifully sweet taste, and it goes brilliantly with chocolate, making these chocolate and beetroot cupcakes from Bake Then Eat a pretty perfect recipe.

Yes it’s cake, but if it’s got veg in and the kids are eating it, so does it matter?

Courgette cake is a similar story – it also goes excellently with chocolate, but this gluten-free version from Blonder Blog leaves out the chocolate in favour of a more citrusy flavour, finished with a lime cream cheese frosting.

If you’re feeling especially cunning, you could even try grating veg into a kid’s birthday cake. A step too far? We’ll let you decide how cunning you’re feeling.