toddler eating veg

[NinjaChipmunk]

how do you get a toddler to eat veg? he'll eat carrot if its hidden in a pasta sauce and occasionally steamed bits of it, sometimes eats soup, and eats potatoes so i guess is not too bad but completely refuses peas, sweetcorn, brocoli etc. i don't want to make meal times a battle but could do with ideas to encourage him. he loves fruit so i've been making sure he has loads of that, i'd just like to develop the veg side! your cunning tips on either hiding more veg or simple encouragement would be most appreciated.

My dc have always preferred to eat raw vegetables as they are crunchy. They've always liked carrots, raw sugarsnap peas, raw fennel and cherry tomatoes.

Soups are good, mine prefer them with pasta.

My DD likes to dip strips of pepper and cucumber in hummous. The sweet red peppers are expensive but she loves them.

another vote for raw veg over cooked.

Also when my 3 were little, I used to whizz raw carrot, onion, celery, mushroom... whatever I had really... up in the processor and add to shepherd's pies. It's 'minced' so small that they can't really detect it when it's mixed well into the real mince, especially if your gravy is dark enough!

If they'll go for smooth soups and pasta sauces then you could hide a lot of things in there.

I sometimes (for my most veg phobic one) do a sort of bean bake type thing, which has onion and then things like carrot and butternut squash diced to roughly the same size as a bean, plus a can of baked beans. Can be topped with cheese & breadcrumbs or mashed potato, or served with rice.

Annabel Karmel, for all her faults, does do a recipe in her Fussy Eaters book for sweetcorn fritters. This particular recipe tells you to blitz the sweetcorn in the processor with the rest of the batter, so there are no tell tale pieces of sweetcorn for them to spot.

IME, it's a lot harder to hide green veg than tomato or root vegetables. I should also say though that my children suddenly and inexplicably got a lot better about it, so there is hope!

I echo pudding (!) - mine love 'dippy' carrots and celery with a small pot of hummous.

Or roasted veg (sweet pots, carrots, chunks of mild onion) again with a dip of mayo, ketchup etc.

Most root veg can be mashed in with potato

Fish pie is good - I finely chop leeks and onions and sweat them down and cook them into the sauce. You can add sweetcorn and blitz it too.

I just did an annabel Karmel recipe tonight and my DD loved it. Basically stuffed potato. Bake a potato, steam broccoli and cauliflower, de-skin tomato and chop, mash and mix together. Scoop out the potato, mash with milk and butter, mix it all together then put it under the grill with cheese on the top. Great way to disguise broccoli (unless your child can recognise the green! My DD can't yet so this works.)