You are what you eat

Faith and Kathy inspired me to talk about the food that we eat. I never used to cook. Hubby and I used to eat out all the time. Then we had kids at that was a game changer. I want my kids to have a healthy balance diet with lots of vegetables and fruits. It is so much harder and expensive to eat healthy food with the kids unless you are making it yourself.

I bought a slow cooker and started looking at easy recipes I could make for my family. I also started meal planning and prepping my food as much as possible and this has helped reduce my cooking time tremendously.

If you have picky eaters and want them to eat vegetables, you can blend things together. this is the case with my tomato and veggie blend for my ribs (I also use this with chicken or fish). So delicious and easy to make while being full of awesome veggies.

All these awesome veggies go into making the sauce

I blend everything together with the maggi cube to give it a bit of flavor

For this meal I used two baby back ribs, cut them in smaller pieces to fit in the crockpot

Put everything together in the crockpot and that was it. 15 min prep time, 6 hours cook time. Easy delicious meal

I also grill veggies that I know my family likes and put seasoning on them to give them a bit of a taste. My favorite is this combination of sweet potatoes, squash and eggplant. The best part is that the sweet potatoes overpowers the other veggies so it's actually sweet and delicious. Oh and I always make enough so that we have some for the week.

Another easy recipe, the hardest part is chopping everything. A bit of olive oil, salt and pepper then grill for 25 min and voila.

The result was a delicious rib dinner with some veggies, yummy I tell you. The best part is that the boys are eating veggies without even noticing that they are. Score.

What I also started doing was adding fruit cups to the lunches. I pre-cut everything and put them in containers for the week. My boys actually love fruits so this is pretty easy. I pick the ones they love, clean them and have them ready to go. All they have to do is eat :).

Pineapple and grapes

Strawberries and grapes

The weekly pack ready to go

Another favorite in our house is baked chicken Parmesan, not much to say about this super awesome meal. Another easy delicious meal I tell you

Another thing I do is hide the veggies :). I know I am sneaky, but a girl has to do what a girl has to do. My hubby loves chicken quesadillas so what I do is add onions and any other veggies that I want (I usually just puree peas or mushrooms or something like that). I also add bacon to hide the taste of my veggies even more. Genius I know :)

Then of course I put this on a tortilla and load it up with cheese. Veggies, what veggies? Brilliant :).

 I bake for less than 10 min and dinner is served. Our plates before we started chowing down

I used to have such a hard time getting my hubby and son to eat any veggies then I got inspired to hide them as much as I could and so far it's been working great. What they don't know can't possibly hurt them :). Of course we eat junk food, candy and chips and such. I am a believer of everything in moderation is acceptable. What techniques are you using to get your family to eat veggies? Please share some recipes.