NOW CLOSED Share your thoughts on eating your 5-a-day with innocent and win a £150 Amazon voucher

[TheOtherHelenMumsnet]

We've been asked by innocent, the smoothie makers, to find out how you hit the five portions of fruit and veg a day goal. Do you religiously munch on carrot sticks and apples or do you rustle up more imaginative healthy dishes? Or does the whole thing pass you by and you want to find out how to fit the recommended five portions of fruit and veg into your diet?

innocent want to hear your hints and tips on how to pack the fruit and veg in, whether it's recipe ideas or quick and easy snacks. They'd also love to hear how you go about getting your DCs to eat their 5-a-day - have you emerged victorious from any difficult battles with veg? Do you have any top tips for sneaking fruit and veg into what they eat? What hints/advice can you give other MNers facing the same problems?

Everyone who adds their comments to this thread will be entered into a prize draw to win £150 Amazon vouchers. Your hints and tips may feature on innocent's mini-site on Mumsnet here.

Thanks and good luck with the prize draw!
MNHQ

i do struggle with the 5 a day and probably would fail without a smoothie or two.
I'm not just saying this because it's a sponsored thread but i find that if i have a smoothie mid morning then i'm well on my way.

today i was pretty good though. had a smoothie mid morning, then for lunch i had a bean, sugar snap pea and edamame pea salad with spinach and then peas, potatoes and carrots with salmon for dinner. i'm not usually that good though.

I bulk out bolognese/stew etc with a tin of pulses (usually black eyed beans or similar) or grated carrot/grated courgette.

As there's absolutely no evidence that eating 5 portions of fruit and veg a day has any health benefits I don't worry about it. I eat fruit and veg because it's tasty. My favourite fruit recipe? Apple and blackberry crumble (blackberries picked from the hedgerows) with custard.

I heard a while ago that the plan was to increase the guideline to 8 a day. They'd have to make it clear it shouldn't be all fruit though, 8 portions of fruit would have so much sugar!

Newyeareverything, you're quite right. In some countries the recommended amount is 10 a day. They did the same with the recommended allowance of alcohol, just plucked figures out of thin air!

It's a good thing to eat fruit and veg though, so I don't care how much we should eat. We eat what we want, and it's nearly always a it more than 5, except for dh who probably has 2 a day, but no sense in forcing him.

Most people eat too much meat though. You only need it 3 times a week or so, fish or pulses for protein otherwise, eggs or dairy. I'll never get that established here. For Dh, it's not a meal without meat (he only just counts mince or fish. My diet became crap when I married!).

I spread it out over the course of the day for the dcs.

Dh usually makes porridge for breakfast so we add sliced banana and sultanas to that.

For breaktime at school they are often given a piece of fruit. Ds needs a high calorie diet so I may make him muffins with a high fruit content, like banana and oat one or a cocoa and courgette one.

Lunch usually involves a carton of fruit juice. Ds might have carrot sticks and dip. His sandwich often has shredded lettuce and sliced cucumber in it as well as the high calorie base. I also make a lot of soups, full of veg, then blended until really smooth which the dcs take to school in flasks.

After school both are keen on apples, cored and sliced, as part of their snacks, or satsumas if I will peel and remove the the pith for them.

We are vegetarians so the basis of an evening meal will be vegetables eg fajitas made with peppers, onions, courgettes, carrots etc. Pasta sauces can be blended, much like the soups, with lots of hidden veg in them.

Dessert is generally yogurt - over strawberries, blueberries and raspberries if we have them.

We don't find it difficult to get our 5 a day really. Our difficulty would be getting a really wide variety of veg. The dcs would stick to the same veg each week.

I literally chuck a fruit salad at the children before breakfast and the telly does not get turned on till they have eaten some fruit.

my dd (3) and ds(7) have no problem hitting their five a day. Breakfast is toast followed by fruit or fruit and yoghurt. They both eat salads and veg at lunch then again at tea time.Since they started eating we ate together and still enjoy tasting new fruits and veg together. if either of us find somethig new we bring it home and have a taster session with the kids where we cut it up and give a score out of ten. The last thing we tasted was dragon fruit.
We make big bucketfuls of veg soup at the weekend and grate carrots into pretty much any savoury dish going. We make banana milkshakes a lot too.

Vegetable soup with at least 5 in :-))

Banana pancakes

Yoghurt and fruit

I am very lucky as both boys love vegetables.

Bit fussier on fruit but they both have a huge chunk of cucumber, pepper, celery, mushrooms and tomatoes for packed lunch and then cooked broccoli or carrots or cabbage for dinner.

I cannot think of a single veg they do not like apart from aubergine. DS1 eats raw broccoli, courgette and cauliflower too if I am preparing it for dinner.

Fruitwise I bake banana bread to get them to taste bananas, ds1 likes pears and apples and ds2 eats lots of berries.

I eat weetabix with any fruit I may have for breakfast, salad and fruit for lunch and chicken or salmon with a shedload of veg for dinner.

I probably eat 8 a day!!

Tonight I made tuna steaks with panfried aubergine and fresh watercress salad. It was a bit random but yummy!

Smoothies are a good way to use up fruit that's a little past its best (sucking up unashamedly here).
We grow a lot of fruit and veg, and the DCs love the limited supply of our small garden. They will eat 2 pods of peas each, 5 blueberries, a carrot and a couple of sprigs of purple sprouting broccoli for example on a graze round the garden. They think it's just a snack, I know they're easily getting an extra fruit& veg portion without noticing
Dried fruit adds up to a fruit portion easily, a handful of raisins or dried apricot on cereal or in custard is an easy portion.
Make sneaky veg soup, put in all the veg your DCs claim to hate, with a stock cube. Boil until soft, then blend until smooth. Add veg your DCs wouldn't object to and cook that too. Your DCs (and often DH) will assume the veg they can see is all the veg there is.

I find 5 a day quite difficult. I don't like fruit juice or smoothies (sorry innocent - too gloopy and sort of acidic on my stomach) and I rarely have the sort of meal for dinner that has a couple of veg alongside it. It's more likely to have veg in it (eg pasta sauce) but that requires me pre-cooking stuff and I don't always have time (my dinner has to be done in ten mins - that's all the time I have available). A typical day's eating might be: breakfast - coffee. Lunch - soup (that counts as one or two because it would always be a veg soup) and a piece of toast with cheese, Dinner - egg on toast. Sum total - 2 portions. I might add a couple of apples but basically that's 4 on a good day. A very good day would have veg curry for dinner which is prob 3 portions but generally I think I struggle.

We do always have plenty of fruit around and the DCs get through loads of that although it gets expensive in the winter - apples are fine for most of the winter but everything else is expensive. My other solutions are cooking up enormous veg chillis and curries at the weekend and making vats of pasta sauce with all the veg in the fridge plus a few tins of tomatoes. Whizzed up with plenty of garlic and chilli it makes even slightly dodgy bagged salad perfectly ok. I throw everything into it and it always turns out well.

Also I really do like the innocent veg pots. I frequently have those for dinner - in fact I had the moussaka one tonight but also really like the bombay curry one, especially with a spoonful of natural yogurt and some humous on the siide. I do sometimes have one for lunch at work but that requires me to be organised enough to take one to work which doesn't always happen.

The children probably do better than me because they almost always have some fruit in their breakfast, veg at lunch (school meals) and for snacks at school and then some sort of veg chilli for dinner. I limit all fruit juice to treats because (a) I don't like it and (b) I don't think it's good for them.

I suppose one of the things I do that does bump up my numbers is eat a lot of pulses. I made a really good spiced chicken with dates recipe the other day and although it was just served with rice, the rice was prepared with lentils in it. The lentils sort of disintegrated into a soupy gravy which just added flavour and fibre without being too lentilly. It was a Hugh Fernley Whittingstall recipe. I'm always on the look-out for more one-pot recipes with pulses that don't end up as a random brown stew....

Oh and finally frozen sweetcorn. I make a really good sweetcorn chowder which is amazingly quick, delicious and has at least 1/5 a day (fry pancetta cubes, add a large chopped onion and some butter if necessary and sweat for 5 mins, add cubed new potatoes and let these cook gently, stirring occasionally until the onions are soft and sweet and the potatoes are cooked through but still firm. When cooked throw in milk, salt and peppper and finally as much frozen sweetcorn as you need to make up one of your five a day for however many people you are serving!).

Add chopped up veg to most meals.

Eat soup, stews, curries, chillies with lots of veg as well as meat.

Fruit bowl always full. Get the kids to eat a piece of fruit after a meal.

Lots of salad.

To sneak fruit and veg in I make my own pasta sauce for the children , I use red and yellow peppers and blitz the sauce in a blender when it's cooked. They hate the sight of a pepper but blissfully eat it hidden in pasta sauce .
We also make homemade pizzas with the kids which they enjoy 'decorating' with sweetcorn and mushrooms.
Hiding strawberries in chocolate mousse is a favourite of mine as is hiding various fruit chopped up in yoghurts.
Our 3 yr old will rarely eat fruit in the home but happily pick and eat berries in our allotment - that's probably the easiest way for us to get him to have his 5 a day !

I have a rule.... 1 piece of fruit before any biscuits....
Between that and always having frozen veg in the freezer and I usually hit my five a day

Oo and I always give them a drink of apple juice with their dinner as the vitamin c helps them to absorb the iron .

Pah. I have almost given up. Dd is 13 and for dinner had half a tin meatballs, two bits of toast and 5 baby sweet corn
She had about half a lettuce leaf in her whole meal roll at lunch and a cookie. They need to start hiding veg in cookies and crisps

Do be careful about fruit consumption though. You can overdose on Vit C and wind up with terrible diarrhoeia.

Some great tips here, I will be adding pureed cauli to bechemel and making fruit puree ice lollies!

I do the blitzed pasta sauce to get extra veg into meals, as well as making high veg meals 'fun' like fajitas, where mushrooms, peppers, courgettes are all in there but building your own and eating with your hands is the fun bit. Freezing watery fruit in the summer is lovely - melon and grapes are lovely frozen.

Smoothies that are basically just blitzed berries with orange juice can provide 3/5 portions minimum.

Add extra berries and grapes to yoghurt and cereal to up intake.

Best tip is to make it easy to eat lots of fruit & veg, so batch cooks soups, stews and pasta sauce; have made up fruit salad or savoury salad / crudite in containers in the fridge to grab easily.

Oh and Del Monte pure fruit ice lollies (orange or pineapple) are one portion of fruit!

When ours were little we always gave them pureed veg from the start, and steamed or baked fruit, and thus have hardly had any problems getting them to have their 5 a day. Always had carrot sticks, cucumber sticks, cherry tomatoes on hand. Dice carrots, celery and onions into spag bol/chillis, dice different veg for lasagne and pasta dishes. Have always encouraged them to try new foods, and we all have a standing joke when eating at Italian restaurants - none of us like olives but we all try one each time, in case our tastes have changed!
We grow fruit and veg, they can help themselves to pcikings in the garden.
And I encourage them to cook and experiment in the kitchen themselves.
Myself, I take 2 pieces of fruit every day for my break, and have a piece as pudding after lunch.
As a vegetarian I cook, and eat, a lot of veg!

For DD it's fairly easy. She has a banana or other fruit for breakfast, one veg with lunch (if not in the dish always accompanied by something like a mix of tomato and cucumber) then another piece of fruit and two veg with dinner.

For myself, I have muesli for breakfast which I'm told counts, that helps, as does having juice. On days I work I probably don't hit 5 (I work lates so have a ready meal in the evening). But on other days I'll count it up and it'll be 6 or 7.

I really like veg and find it easier to get the required number of portions a day that way than by fruit which I find a bit of a drag.

I make lots of veg curries and casseroles, and also salads with roast veg - last night was rocket with roast squash, red onion, pomegranate and feta. Tonight will be griddled courgette with the rest of the feta.

I find variety is important, so for that reason I am thinking of getting a veg box just to stop us getting in a rut.

With the children I often give them a plate of raw veg while tea is cooking - peppers, carrots, peas etc. They are more likely to eat those than if they are on the plate.

I was hopeless at getting my 5 a day until I had my baby - now with being responsible for her diet I find that I am more conscious of what and my husband eat. I mash a lot of veggies to make them more appealing and try to put them in other dishes, for example carrots in spagbol or cottage pie. Also using carrot, cucumber, babycorn, peppers etc to dip in yummy dips seems to encourage reluctant veg eaters!