How do you make sure you all eat five a day as a family?

[Wollstonecraft1]

I, like many people, am sick of doing the same foods on rotation trying to cater for all of our preferences. Sometimes we do four different meals - or a twist on it which I realise is ridiculous but DH and I are both bad too as we both what we want rather than what is easiest!

We do eat fruit and veg, but I could do with upping the veg count of our meals as I'm tired of chucking boring steamed brocolli and carrots on the side of everything.

How do you make sure you eat five a day?

I don't think it's that difficult. Mine are older now and eat a normal adult health diet.

When they were younger they got
occasional fruit on cereal
juice box, piece of fruit and wrap/pitta containing lots of salad along with protein at lunch
at least two portions with dinner
often fruit afterwards.

So always 5 often more.

They can indeed count as one of 'your five a day'. They are the seeds of immature vegetables and very healthy! They are also an economical way to bulk out food!

Asian style noodle soups with beansprouts, Pak choi, choi sum, spring onion, ginger, chilli etc.
A little finely sliced raw steak that cooks in the broth, or sliced char Sui pork. I make a huge vat of stock every so often and freeze in portions.
Fritters from any selection of odds and ends of cooked or raw vegetables, bit of cheese / ham / salami / tuna, maybe some bread crumbs if I have a slice of stale bread to use, flour, egg. Great in lunch boxes with a little pot of dip or sauce.
Tray bakes, chilli, stir fry, curry.
Any bits of fruit that are going a bit soft stewed up together with maybe a few sultanas, dates, drizzle if maple syrup then use in porridge, yoghurt or little tubs in lunch boxes.

I'd like to give a huge shout-out to Jamie Oliver - I've now made 4 recipes from his Superfood Family Classics book and every single one has been a huge winner with my family. I did the Chicken Jalfrezi tonight and my DH said that was definitely one to make again (he is a very good eater but he's never that effusive, if you know what I mean).
Each recipe has full nutritional information including the number of fruit/veg portions each serving contains. My family and I have massively increased our F/V consumption to easily 5-7 a day since I started cooking from that book last week.

I will be honest, some of the recipes are a bit more fiddly than they appear to be when you read them (and forget the times specified!) but I am just so pleased with the results that I'll put the time in to get some healthier recipes that taste awesome under my belt. And I think I got the book for around £7, so a real bargain.

Lots of good tips here, just as a different approach you could take sometimes - serving a small portion of vegetable soup as a starter. So have a slightly scaled down dinner, and present everyone with a small bowl or mug-size portion of veggie soup first. That would get probably two portions of veg in nice and simply. There's so many different sorts of veg soup out there you could do it with from simple carrot and lentil to roasted red pepper and tomato or creamy cauliflower, you can whizz it all up or leave it chunky, experiment with different seasonings, endless possibilities!

I'm a lone parent on a budget so lots of roast vedge from frozen.

Kale is cheap, keeps a while and is really nice roasted.

I always add fresh spinach to pasta at the end.

Have fruit juice - it has a lot of sugar but we don't have sugar otherwise.

To whoever was asking - onion counts, but you have to have a lot of it.

Baked Beans count as well, but get the low sugar ones.

Also have you seen the very credible study saying that, although its good to get as much as you can, there's not a huge difference between having 3 and 5 portions? As long as the 3 portions are decently sized....
www.theguardian.com/science/2017/aug/29/life-saving-fruit-and-vegetable-diet-need-only-be-three-portions-study

Five seems a bit out of reach for me personally atm, I aim for 3 - 4.