If you don’t like vegetables, you’re probably used to shying away from most vegetable talk – but stay with us, because this article is for you.
Seriously, just try these tasty vegetables
Maybe you find vegetables too mushy, too bland, or just too reminiscent of unfortunate childhood dinner memories. But fear not, vegetable-hater! Somewhere out there lives a vegetable – nay, a family of vegetables – that’s just perfect for you.
Zucchini
At first glance, yes, zucchini does very closely resemble those dreaded vegetables that you wanted to avoid in the first place. But you’d be amazed at the things you can do with zucchini. You can put it on pizza, stuff it with tomatoes and beef, put it in tacos, bake it in strips and top with parmesan cheese, even cut it into strips and add pesto. The options are endless and delicious, and zucchini delivers such good amounts of vitamin A, antioxidants, and folate – among other nutrients – that it’s worth mixing into any recipe.
Eggplant
Eggplant has antioxidants and fiber, very little sodium, and beneficial effects on our cholesterol, blood pressure, and glucose absorption. The most incredible thing about an eggplant, though, is its flexibility: eggplant works well in recipes of all seasons, sizes, and tastes. You can mix eggplant into cheese paninis, fry it into savory chips and dip those in yogurt, use it like pizza dough and melt tomato sauce, cheese, and toppings on the eggplant, and even mash it up with olives, herbs, and chilli to make meatless eggplant meatballs. That’s not boring or bland, now is it?
Butternut squash
Strange-looking but delicious, butternut squash is similar in color to a cantaloupe, but shaped more like, well, a squash. It provides a huge array of antioxidants, starches that help regulate insulin and inflammation, massive amounts of vitamin A and vitamin C, as well as fiber and vitamin B6.
But these health benefits pale in comparison to the taste of the things you can make with it. You can roast butternut squash and mix it with balsamic dressing, blue cheese, and pecans. You can add it to your black bean enchiladas. It can be pureed and used to cream pasta, cubed and tossed onto pizzas, and, if you want a sweet but healthy dessert, used in a butternut squash-sage tart. Basically, if there’s a recipe, you can probably add butternut squash to it.
Sugar snap peas
They’re sweet. They’re juicy. And they make an awesome crunch when you bite into them. Sugar snap peas are like nature’s healthy green chip. You can dunk them in a dip or eat them by themselves – they’re that flavorful. Of course you can add them to a recipe too, but for all intents and purposes we think you’ll like these enough on their own. They have high amounts of vitamin C, fiber, vitamin A, vitamin K, iron, and manganese. It’s hard to imagine there are that many healthy things packed into such little pieces of food, but that’s how sugar snap peas roll.
Turnips
Turnip for what? Turnips may seem like the ultimate un-enjoyable vegetable, the most vegetable-y veggie of them all. But in reality, they’re a surprisingly awesome option for people who don’t usually enjoy vegetables.
The key here is substitution. You can actually replace potatoes with turnips in a lot of recipes. French fries, garlic mashed potatoes, potato gratin, baked potatoes – you can do all of these things, but replace part or even all of the potatoes in the recipe with turnips. And the best part is that turnips have a much lower carbohydrate count, and they also provide you with more fiber, as well as great amounts of calcium, magnesium, potassium, and vitamin C. Time to turn up your turnip consumption.
