How to Eat Vegetables That You Don't Like

Having recently become a vegetarian, you might be surprised to learn that I don't like every vegetable in existence. In fact, I dislike many of them. With great intensity. However, I am always trying to set a good example for everyone so I think it's important for me to eat as many different vegetables as possible to get all the benefits I can. Not only that, but certain things I don't like *cough cough squash cough cough* is extraordinarily cheap at the farmers market and is readily available, which means I should do my best to find a way to get it in my food to save money and help my body at the same time. So, here are my tricks to tricking myself into eating vegetables I don't like.

Dice it: If you chop it up into really tiny pieces, you might not even notice it's there! This works particularly well in dishes with broth, like soup or a pot pie, where the vegetable can sort of hide in the undercurrent and its flavor is overpowered by everything else in the dish. If you dice it small enough, it might even 'disappear' completely into your creation and you'll forget it's there. That works too.

These are vegetables I DO like.

Shred it: I don't like zucchini, but it's cheap and it's a vegetable. Therefore, I decided to incorporate it into my life. I have found that shredding it and putting it into whatever I'm making is a great way of hiding it for myself. Usually, I shred it and throw it in a stir fry (for myself) or I shred it and saute it with garlic and olive oil and make it into a frittata for Heidi and Piper. Granted, I also don't eat eggs like that, so I'm not enjoying my creation, but I know they're getting an extra serving of vegetables in the morning every other day.

Puree it: I don't like squash. It is also a relatively easy to find vegetable and isn't $100 million (most days) so I try to buy it and do something with it when I can. Up until now, I have not been eating it myself, save for the occasional spaghetti squash replacing spaghetti. Heidi and Piper will eat a roasted butternut or acorn squash straight out of the oven, but if I want to get the nutrients from this spiffy vegetable, I have to transform it. I'm still proud of myself for coming up with the idea of pureeing the roasted butternut squash with some vegetable stock and then dumping that bad boy right into the soup I was creating that day. It gave the broth a little bit of an interesting color and was completely undetectable during ingestion. Brilliant.

Dissolve it: Though I've only done it a couple times, I would like to make it more of a habit because I know how good this particular food is for all of us. Avocado. Blech. Gross. Vomit. But yet, when I dissolve it in vinegar, treating it like plain yogurt or mayonnaise that would go into the dressing of a cole slaw, I can eat it on my salad. So vinegar, some avocado, Bragg's, olive oil and onion powder create a nice, tasty salad dressing where I can almost ignore the fact that the avocado is in there. (Thanks to Steve's friend Jason who taught me this trick and doesn't know that I've used it.)

So when in doubt, throw the offending vegetable into a soup, pasta sauce, put it on a pizza or puree it to smithereens. You'll be eating veggies you don't like in no time.