What's your sneakiest way of getting your child to eat fruit/veg?

[mummytummy]

I am feeling so smug after getting DD1 (2.9) to eat a whole tomato and a mushroom:

skin and de-seed the tomato. Fry mushroom and tomato in butter until soft. Puree with a hand blender and stir into omelette mixture before putting it in the pan.

Anyone got any other sneaky ones?

puree carrot and add to tomato ketchup or tomato pasta sauce

Pasta sauce, you can bung anything into it, same with veg soup! just majorly flavour with tomato!! (works for dh too!)

tomato ketchup - fantastic!!

Mix a jar of baby food (carrots, for example) into macaroni and cheese.

That ommlette idea is fab! Will try that tonight.

mash lots of veggies into creamy mashed potato, grate a little cheese on it and grill the top. Leeks, carrots, parsnips, peas, beans, broccoli all work well.

For bigger kids you can make lovely & healthy frozen ice lollies out of the pressed fruit juices (pure fruit, no sugar ones)

Stick pieces of fruit onto cocktail sticks anddip into melted (microwaved) chocolate. LEave to cool and eat.

Make a lovely healhy juice, as long as you use apple and carrot (sweet) as a base you can add cucumber, a small handfull of spinach, couple of florrets of broccoli, celery a small piece of ginger, pineapples always nice, then what I do is put it in a "posh" (wine) glass, ds2 who is nearly 7 thinks its a special treat

brill idea with the ketchup, fussy DS2 won't eat without it!

Oh, I just do a lot of shouting. "Don't you dare eat that! That will make you run faster and I won't be able to catch you!" And when he eats, there's lots of shrieking, shaking of fists, shouting, all that. (If he's actually done something wrong, there's no shouting, just calm boringness. And I do giggle sometimes inbetween the shouting and screaming.)

He really enjoys the whole reverse psychology thing. He'll say "Mummy, say I can't do it" when he's about to do something.

Carrot cake

I have always offered vegetables and fruits as snacks alongside more obviously thought of junk food .. like crisps

ie "DS do you want crisps or a carrot"

he often asked for the carrot instead

of course now he's 4 that tactic doesn't work so well but he polishes off veg

carrot cake may have carrots in it but it also has loads of butter, honey, sugar .. I think a fairy cake or a muffin is actually better for them than carrot cake TBH

The carrot cake recipe I use only has 2 tbsp sugar compared to 2 cups flour, 1 cup shredded carrot, not much at all, really. Carrot is very sweet on its own. And little kids need fat, I have no problem with butter addiction in my kids.

My trick was always to save water after boiling potatoes/veg and mix it with fruit juice -- DS1 drank this concoction but DD was never willing!

However, you can use the same water to make pastry or boil spaghetti in the next day, add more vitamins to these things.

Blended carrot in bolognaise sauce.

"what to Expect in the First Year" has a recipe for carrot cake involving carrots, raisins, apple juice, wholemeal flour, veg oil and eggs - no sugar, no butter... Haven't made it for ages cos dd eats veg ok now.

But I do make pumpkin/squash savoury muffins and carrot pancakes cos they're nice.

Also chocolate courgette muffins - on the basis that if I'm giving her a cake anyway, she may as well have one with some veg snuck in. And you can't tell its in there (haven't told dh either).

Oven "chips" made out of sweet potatoes are nice (coat sliced potato in beaten egg white, bake at 220c for 30 min).

And you can bung pureed fruit/veg in anything - spag bog, lasagne, casserole, weetabix...

Dd has a bowl of peas as a snack, because I can't stand them so we never have them at meals, so she doesn't realise they're not sweets .

Annabel Karmel has loads of recipes for fried vegetable sausage type things. Far too much effort if they'll eat veg any other way but good if they won't!

put a fruit salad together and then let them eat it in front of the telly (usually banned chez Enid)

since ds has been old enough to refuse certain types of fruit and eveg,(gave him all sorts when baby), i generally have made a vareity of fruit crumbles, with no sugar, to get him to eat variety of fruit that way. more recently hes turned his nose up at those - until today ! eg i'd make plum crumble, pear and plum, apple, banana and raspberry.usual ones. he does quite well with veg with a meaty dinner and gravy, but i do have a recipe for root veg crumble! - interestingly yummy!

I still put all sorts of vegetables into tomato sauce. None of my children like visible pieces of onion in bolognese sauce so I have long put the finished sauce in the blender to make a sort of smooth sauce. It then occurred to me that since they weren't going to see the ingredients, I could put all sorts in. I quite enjoy seeing what I can get away with - I never make a spag bol now without putting in at least a red pepper!

I chop up spinach and put stir it into pasta sauce.

Pizza sauce. Effectively the same as pasta sauce really

Bubblre and squeak - serve veg and potatoes with roasts, save all left overs, magimix them together with a chopped up onion, fry in olive oil till warmed through and some crispy bits start to form. Serve with lots of tomato ketchup.

Milge - that should now read serve with tomato ketchup with hidden pureed carrot!!

I do the vegetable oven chips. I also slice the veg or fruit really thinly and bake. They then look like crisps. The brood are pretty good at veggies though! The only thing that DS1 absolutely won't touch is parsnips.