to think fruit and vegetables are a bit of a con

[mariej2]

Me and the hubby have both never been a big fan of fruit and veg. We don't worry about having 5 a day and probably rarely do. We are both healthy late 30s, not overweight and hardly ever get ill.

Now dd is at school we are having her friends round for dinner. One was horrified that we fed her daughter fish fingers, baked beans with diet cola. To be fair we would usually have sweet corn with this meal simply because we like it but we had ran out.

It feels like kids are being punished by feeding them kale and broccoli and nothing nice.

Apparently a glass of orange juice has as much sugar as a Mars bar. If you give your child the orange juice that's not much of a treat and once they become a teenager they will gorge on all the forbidden foods!

I think this whole eat fruit and veg is a conspiracy to make the supermarkets more money and make people miserable.

"Uneducated and skint", really?! Don't most people roll out slightly junky meals for visiting children because you have no clue what they like or reliably eat, so better to go with safe favourites rather than feel bad for getting it quite wrong? It's being a good host to serve what they will definitely like, rather than dictate what you think they should eat.

I have different rules about what DC are expected to eat, they accept that fine.

Beans on toast is junky? Who would have thought it?

I made home made baked beans once what a colossal waste of time.

Rolling out a slightly junky meal could equally be getting it wrong and not be something that they would reliably eat. Not all children are fans of slightly junky meals.
One of my children would much rather a chicken breast with vegetables than he would a typical slightly junky meal. If somebody served him up a couple of fishfingers and baked beans he would wonder when the real food was going to arrive.
I remember my mum feeding my mate a burger and chips with beans and I was so embarrassed. When I went to my friends house we had a pasta dish with garlic bread and I thought her mum was really posh and not skint like my own mum.

The people who don't eat much or any fruit and veg - what do you eat? (Genuine question from a vegetarian.) Meat, grains and dairy products only?

weatherall

Since you haven't started your new thread yet

Make a list of whatever saucy dishes you eat.

Pizza, pasta, shepherds pie, lasagne, etc.

When you make your sauce, start every base with a decent amount of finely chopped / or even blended onion and celery. This plus chopped tomatoes is already a good portion of veg.

With a pizza sauce, take this base and add in chopped mushroom, garlic, aubergine, courgette, and anything else you fancy. Let it simmer for 40 mins or so, and blend it all up so it's lovely and thick. Play with veg types and quantities till you get a taste and consistency you like. This on your pizza should go unnoticed and is again a good quantity of veg. Also try adding in chopped veg as a pizza topping - peppers especially are lovely and sweet.

You can use the above as a pasta sauce base, adding an extra carton of chopped tomatoes and some water. Then you can add cooked mince and stock, or bacon, etc etc - what ever you like to make a really lovely sauce. Use for lasagne too.

When making something like shepherds pie, again start with the onion and celery, but add in chopped or grated carrot. When you have cooked it all through with mince etc, just before topping with potato, stir through petit pois.

These are all really easy, innoffensive ways of adding veg into your meals without having to have a big pile on your plate to plow through.

Little or even no veg in ones diet is a recipe for all sorts of bowel disorders in later life.Diverticular disease probably being the most common.Excellent idea about using a basic ragout with onion,carrot,celery and pepper in all dishes.It works well for adults as well as children and can be made in bulk and frozen in batches.

Do the veg haters not like raw veg as well as cooked?

I was thinking of this thread when I made my work lunch earlier today and I have cut up two small carrots, half a courgette and a bit of cucumber (as per pic) to make crudits.

I weighed these to find that they total 400 grammes, which is equal to five portions (a portion is 80 g, which really isnt that much).

I will also have an apple, so that is 6 portions before I even have my evening meal.

I will nibble on some of the veg sticks this morning, and eat the rest with a smoked salmon/prawn/cream cheese/lemony pate thing for lunch (just take the ingredients and mush together nothing complicated or fancy).

I will probably julienne the rest of the courgette, along with a carrot and spring onion and bake them in paper with some white fish and boursin very easy and a couple of more portions tonight - the boursin makes a sauce that disguises the veg, which are all in tiny bits anyway.

Agree that supermarkets will make a lot more money from processed food than fruit and veg, as demonstrated by the masses of aisles filled with masses of crisps, pop and sweets/chocolate.

Slithy thats what i was going to say - plus to make life even easier you can buy a lot of veg frozen in ready chopped form (like chopped onions, sliced peppers, sliced mushroom (not actually a veg but does count in 5 a day), diced carrots, etc).

I use onion, peppers as a base for most meals, then add other things to make it into various meals like diced or baby carrot, petit pois, sweetcorn, tinned toms, mushroom. - Normally theres 3-4portions of veg in our average main meal, sometimes 5.

Also sweet potato is great as a side, if your not a veg fan.

You plant a seed in nutrient poor soil, you fail to improve the soil, that plant may grow but it will fail to thrive and will be more prone to diseases and pests and that's how I see the food we consume, we can either choose to provide a nutrient rich diet or live on junk...it will catch up with you eventually and unfortunately it will often be too late to fix the problem.
I wouldn't freak if you fed my child fish fingers, beans and diet coke because I know my kids get fed nutrient rich food normally, so eating like like that on a rare occasion is unlikely to cause them any harm.

I watched Fat, Sick and Nearly dead, on Netflix, my kids watched it too....it really drove home the need to eat properly - for the first time they thought about the impact of a poor diet on their health, being chronically ill isn't much fun, even if you can eat all the junk food in the world.

Oh and op i wouldnt have flipped over fish fingers and baked beans, although i really do think you should have at least added sweetcorn and petit pois to the side.

However i would have been fuming at the idea youd give my young primary aged child coke! The caffine in it is dreadful. I probably would have tolerated non-caffinated fizzy as a one off.

Also it is not a "punishment" to give children proper foods inc fruit and veg. If you offered my son a strawberry or a chunk of chocolate hed take the strawberry, eat it and then ask for another strawberry ignoring the chocolate.

Ultimately youre tastebuds are "set" by what you are fed on in the early years (you can learn to like different things when youre older but its harder). So a child raised on healthy foods will in all likelyhood be an adult who likes healthy foods, whereas a child raised on junk will in all likelyhood be an adult who only really likes junk. A good demonstration of this is the foods eaten in other countries that to them are considered a delicacy but to us are gross.

I coat kale with fat - usually good quality free range pork fat and roast it in the oven with Parma ham. It's really good to snack on or add texture to a chopped salad.

I have started another thread now!

But to answer the questions here, as a non veg eater, I eat loads of cheese, at least one meal per day will be based around cheese. I find it hard to go a whole day without cheese. I do also eat quite a lot of fruit. We have cut down as we were spending £25+ pwk on fruit and we can't afford that anymore so it's mostly just bananas, satsumas, the odd apple and strawberries as a treat now. I like tinned pears and peaches but they are so expensive now too.

I don't like cold things in a plate with hot things so I don't have salad as an accompianent. I will eat a dinner of salad but it will be different things on different parts if the plate, not mixed together, eg lettuce, sliced ham, sliced apple, carrot sticks, cheese, beetroot, bread. But DP doesn't like this, even though he's veggie so we never have it. He doesn't like omelettes or quiches or soups either so I do t eat them anymore either.

I try not to have pasta, as I only like the wholemeal ones and find it leaves me bloated. Pasta feels like empty calories to me.

I gre up on a meat and 2 veg diet so very healthy but I hated the veg! My parents would make me stay at the table til bedtime when I refused the over boiled cabbage/broccoli/sprouts etc. I see eating veg as a punishment.

We never had fancy veg then eg peppers/aubergines. When I met DP he did get me eating these new foods but that seems to have slipped away.

Weatherall my parents murdered veg and I hated it. Broccoli was cooked for an hour - even I wouldn't eat it. The 1970s have a lot to answer for.

Rainydayblues. You are so right. Sure, your body runs okish on a bad diet (or you think it does) but you are storing up problems in the future.

I've always eaten fruit and veg but last year I cut sugar right down and started always cooking from scratch. Now my diet is much more based on vegetables. I often sauté a mixture of vegetables, use some and keep the rest as an ingredient for the next day. Onions courgettes peppers and aubergine with garlic and chilli make a great base for loads of things: soups, pasta sauces, omelette fillings or just as a side dish. When I bake potatoes I roast some vegetables as well, either to have with the potato or just as an ingredient to have in the fridge.

I now really notice if I don't eat vegetables for a couple of days and feel better as soon as I do.

Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants is really good advice but it took me some time to realise that it means making vegetables central and incorporating them into food rather than just adding them to a dubious diet.

Juniper berries make gin? I never knew...

Yikes Weather no wonder you don't like veg then! Go easy on yourself, it's a big adjustment to change your diet, so take it slowly :)

Courgettes-Really what is the point of them other than to soak up huge quantities of butter and olive oil? Is there anything more lacking in taste?

And poor old baked beans. Here was I thinking I'm dead posh with my cherry tomatoes to be eaten as snacks and 5 types of olive oil and balsamic vinegar and seems I'm as common as muck.

Courgettes are best eaten when they are as close to the size of an index finger as possible. As they get bigger their flavour just gets shared out. I like the small ones raw.

I love courgettes steamed and sprinkled with sea salt and olive oil. They're better eaten small, like most veg in the marrow family --admittedly, big ones are watery and bland.

IMO Baked beans just taste awful and I think they may have got worse, too sweet with very little flavour...I make my own version with canned beans, tomato and some garlic and maybe a bit of balsamic vinegar, a bit of smoked bacon or chorizo. They don't taste like Heinz though - thank god!

I love courgette. Sliced in a stir fry, grated in muffins, chopped into spag bol mmm

Courgettes-Really what is the point of them other than to soak up huge quantities of butter and olive oil? Is there anything more lacking in taste?

I have a good recipe for zucchini bread. The added sugar, flour, etc. adds flavor (and calories!), but I would assume it doesn't negate the vitamins in the zucchini.

Feta and courgette muffins are amazing. I love them.

Mmm feta, courgette, pea and mint risotto

I do a courgette and boursin risotto that is amazing - just a standard risotto with grated courgette stirred in about halfway through and finished with a blob of boursin and parmesan.

When low carbing, cut into ribbons and stir fried, they make a great alternative to spaghetti/linguine type pasta.

I also do a courgette/feta/gram flour pancakey fritter thing - delicious.

The first year I grew courgettes, I had 4 plants that did very well and we had a million courgettes a day for weeks.

I read later that two courgette plants would supply a family generously with courgettes, so four plants for a couple, one of whom doesn't really like courgettes, is a bit overwhelming, but I really could write a book entitled '101 things to do with courgettes and none of them are rude' .