Eat your greens!

So now you know how much lettuce we've been lucky enough to receive in our farmshare due this nice cool summer. Not to mention that there's also chard, beets, kale, radish/beet/kohlrabi greens, zucchini, carrots, potatoes and so much more that comes with each weekly CSA box.

Veggies at every meal have become the order of the day and I have been pleasantly surprised at how relatively well my kids have received this. That's not to say that they sit down and eat the super-sized salads that mommy and daddy eat. Ha! But they do accept their daily side salad at dinner and have taken to having the rest of their daily allotment in some unexpected ways.

For instance, we all sat down and enjoyed eating a version of Cobb salad for dinner last week.

No complaints about having salad as their entire dinner. Even a compliment for how yummy the salad looked and tasted. Mental note: Cobb salad is genius.

Or I can use the greens as part of the food delivery vehicle, like making Vietnamese lettuce cups (recipe will come in one of the next few posts). Funny how when the lettuce becomes the equivalent of a tortilla and the carrots and cucumbers become cheese/garnish, the kids suddenly forget that they're even there and devour much more than they would if they were eating the components separately.

There's also the tried and true method of baking the veggies into something sweet, like zucchini muffins/cake. (This recipe should be making its way into a post shortly as well).

But most prominently, they'll willingly and even joyfully drink their veggies.

Now I know that this is nothing revolutionary and that blending food into smoothies has long been a way to get children and adults to consume more of anything that they would normally deem distasteful. But it still does not cease to amaze me how my second son has gone from:

"Nooo, I don't wan it. I'm scared of the veng-tabels!

To: "Yeah, yeah, yes! I want [green/red/purple] smoothie for breakfast!"

Here are two of my children drinking a beet/chard/watermelon/strawberry concoction that our Nutribullet whipped up in a breeze. Loving the Nutribullet btw (unpaid and unsolicited praise). I haven't hidden from them the ingredients of their smoothies either, in fact they eagerly watch me prepare it every morning.

Hopefully, the novelty of drinking their veggies won't wear off anytime soon and in the future I can combine this with their love of squeeze baby foods to create the ultimate lunchbox snack... Will keep you posted on how that evolves :)