Vegetables for Adolescents

Most parents want their adolescents to eat more vegetables. The first step is to serve more vegetables! But fresh vegetables have their own challenge: they wilt and go bad pretty quickly, they take some time to prepare, and because of seasonality, your favorites may not always be available.

Here are some tips for dealing with those challenges.

Storing vegetables to stay fresh longer

There are many tips for storing vegetables and fruit to extend their life. Some of the tips that have been working for me lately are the following;

• Ensuring there are no spoiling vegetables in a package or bag to affect the others. 
• Refrigerating most vegetables (I keep my potatoes and onions out of the fridge)
• Silver foil! Wrapping my celery in foil keeps it crisp for weeks.
• Remove the moisture. Wrapping my lettuce in paper towel keeps them dry, and then I wrap that in foil and it stays good for weeks. 

Ready to use vegetables

I’m a huge proponent for ready-to-use vegetables. While they may often be more expensive than non-prepared vegetables, they’re more likely to be used, so you’re saving on wasted produce!

Ready-to-eat vegetables include:

• baby peppers & tomatoes that can be thrown into a lunch box
• cut up stir fry vegetables can be tossed into a frying pan with your protein of choice
• riced cauliflower to bake with cheese in muffin tins
• peeled & cubed squash for soup
• bagged coleslaw for salads or stir-fry

Frozen & canned vegetables 

While fresh vegetables are great, they don’t store well or last very long, and I seem to never have them on-hand when I want. That’s why I’m a major fan of frozen and canned vegetables. Stock up on them once a week or a couple times a month and you always have produce to fall back on!

10 Simple Adolescent Friendly Vegetables

• Saute frozen green-beans until hot, add butter & sprinkle with garlic powder and salt
• Use chunky salsa as pasta sauce

• Add frozen mixed vegetables to a boxed soup when heating, and bring to a boil. (You can also add them in post-heating to cool down soup without diluting it for kiddies.)

• Spread frozen vegetables on baking tray, sprinkle with salt & pepper + other spices and bake @ 350 for 45 minutes
• Add canned vegetables to cooked grains

• Serve canned vegetables at meals and snacks

• Add canned mushrooms, baby corn & green beans to rice noodles

Use coleslaw mix in cabbage soup (try my recipe)

• Spice and bake baby carrots (skip the peeling and slicing)

• Add pre-washed and chopped spinach to scrambled eggs, omelettes, or baked egg muffins

Vegetables can be difficult for kids and teens to eat and enjoy. And it can be challenging for parents to find easy and tasty ways to include vegetables in their adolescent’s food. By looking at vegetables as more than the produce aisle, your options expand! And ensuring your vegetables are flavorful and come in a variety of textures and appearances, your adolescent is way more likely to eat and enjoy them.