Vegies are tasty!

This post ties in well with my recent guest posts over at  Brisbane Kids - creative food play and my favourite pizza base recipe.  Brisbane Kids is also on Facebook and are a great way to keep up with cheap and fun activities around Brisbane such as expos, fetes, festivals and other celebrations.

We're having a little trouble convincing Geekling to eat vegetables at the moment.  The frustrating thing is that he will eat the same vegies in one form (on a pizza, pureed, mashed or in another dish) but then not in another (whole or chopped).  We don't want to take the developmental step back into purees all the time so here are a few of the things we've been trying to overcome this:

Muffin Tin Meals

We try to give Geekling a muffin tin meal once a week, and challenge ourselves to include one food he hasn't eaten before.  He will usually try something from each of the six compartments but we must admit he doesn't often go back for a second mouthful of vegies.

Dip-Dip

We tried lightly steaming some carrots and broccoli, and adding some yellow capsicum and cherry tomatoes, then serving with a home made cheesy dip (recipe below).  He loved this but tended to just dip the vegies, suck the dip off and dip again.

Our floor cleaner (dog) Mr L waiting patiently in the background for any dropped vegies or drips of dip

Cheesy dip: simply mix and microwave lightly to warm

2 tbsp cream cheese
1/4 cup cream
1 - 2 heaped tbsp grated cheese
1/2 tsp french onion soup mix

I threw this together using leftovers, but you could also use store-bought cream cheese spread or combine corn relish, gherkin relish or even tuna to cream cheese.

Vegie Tempura

Since Geekling is a fiend for fried potato chips we thought we'd try tempura.  He had a little bit, but it wasn't the success we'd hoped for.  He'd had a big afternoon of grazing at a birthday party and had some fresh bread while I was frying up so we might try again soon.

 Geekling gets started while Mumma continues frying

We used calamari and prawns, sweet potato, spring onion, green beans, red capsicum, broccoli, mushroom ans zucchini.

We wound up with two full plates of tempura left over after hubby, Geekling and I had finished and had to call in reinforcements to help eat it!

On our list of things to try is baked vegie "chips" and American-style pumpkin pie or muffins (both of which I LOVE).  Geekling loves vegie pizzas and fritters, so we do have some back up plans, and we tend to sneak grated veg into lots of other meals like meatballs, pasta sauces etc so we're sure he's well enough.