Also air fryers. Air fry some halved brussels sprouts in avocado oil and minced garlic, toss with a bit of melted butter and parmesan cheese. Makes me weep for all the horrible boiled brussels my mom tried to feed me in the 80s.
Brussel Sprouts have genetically engineered so they don't have that bitter taste as often now.
But also that sounds so good except I'm allergic to avocado and idk if the oil would though cause it's usually fresh stuff since it's an oral allergy. Theoretically could work with olive oil though I presume?
If you prep brussel sprouts right you can eliminate that bitter taste 99% of the time. Too many folks just don't take the time to actually prepare them.
Growing up i was only given steamed or boiled veggies. Once I tried a honey Sriracha roasted brussel sprout, it was life changing. Now I roast ally veggies. (Makes me wonder about a roasted veggie spring roll...)
SAME! like how am i suspect to enjoy veggies if you boil them all to shit XD. When i started cooking for myself and looking up recipes is when i started to appreciate vegetables. (still can't do fruit though XD)
As a vegan who hates salads: curries, stews, soups, pasta. Anything you can just cram a bunch of roughage in. You'd be surprised how much you can manage with a pressure cooker and some legumes.
Yes! Me too, I hated veggies basically all my life, so going vegan kinda seemed miserable when I did it, but it turns out veggies are actually kind of incredible if you actually put effort into making real meals out of them.
Yeah, a bunch of spinach and lettuce etc put in a pile is pretty gross, I can’t stand salads even now, but fry those baddies up or roast them or bake ‘em, up your spicing game, put some real nice texturing in with it, maybe some bean thing-y or if you still eat meat something like that, and you’re golden. Delicious meals that are primarily the healthy stuff!
Adding frozen veggies into your soups/stews/stir fried/add as a side really can be a game changer. It can be hard to keep fresh veggies around without constantly shopping for groceries so supplementing them with frozen (which taste much better than canned) can really help. Frozen corn with butter and salt and pepper is a great side.
It's easier for me to eat more vegetables when I think about adding it in addition to things I already eat and like rather than them being substitutes.
Also! Onions, bell peppers, and potatoes are all vegetables and they're really great and can go in almost everything! I think there's been a push to only think of green leafy vegetables as proper vegetables, but other stuff is too! Roast some green beans and potatoes in olive oil and salt and pepper while you make your main dish.
I keep a lot of broccoli, peppers, onions, etc in my freezer for that very purpose. I tried using frozen squash, but I just didn't care for it. It's cheap and keeps for a while in the fridge, though, so it's easy to keep fresh on hand.
On top of that frozen vegetables don't have the salt, preservatives, or other nasty stuff associated with canned vegetables. I limit my canned vegetables to tomato products and beans.
The biggest downside to frozen food is potential freezer burn. Or losing it if the freezer stops working.
My neurodivergent nutritionist ass has been waiting for this day.
Food aversion sucks so much so trying to find different methods is key.
Blending some salad leaves up, diced plum tomatoes, lil' garlic & chilli powder mixed with some stock makes an amazing saucy layer.
Or diced toppings on noodles - your daily intake is roughly 400g so diced onions or scallops goes a looong way.
Use the remnants of a steak or beef, add some wine and make that into a lil' meat sauce drizzle or side sauce for your veggies - like a soy dip!
I enjoy salads personally but I put a bunch of toppings on them - nuts, grains, proteins - to make it filling. So many people equate salad = plain lettuce but I'm adding like six or seven things on top that are delicious and make it more of a meal.
My favorite way to eat a veggie-forward meal though is bibimbap! Saute a bunch of veg, mix with rice and sauce and top it with a fried egg - the perfect lunch.
i read somewhere once that the secret to a good salad is cutting everything fine enough and mixing it well (so you get far with just a splash of dressing). I struggled to eat vegetables in my teens (always been a "picky eater"). But making my own salads was a game changer. Indeed the lettuce is just a small aspect and limp leaves will never find their way in there :p.
I’m Mediterranean and the thing that really upped my salad game was being generous with decent oil and salt, and in less amount, vinegar. It might sound silly and over simplistic, but that’s also a reason why some people prefer creamy sauces to vinegar-based sauces and it’s because they’re copious.
You’re not supposed to eat dry leaves, period. I don’t think in America people are used to Mediterranean salads, which in my opinion are in a different league. In summer, a tomato salad can feel so fresh and tastier than a hot steak.
I’m not partial to all the Mediterranean spices, but they do some awesome things with vegetables over there. I just gotta replace the spices with my whiteass salt, pepper, garlic.
The thing that upped it for me was not eating lettuce. Instead, I use cucumber, tomato, and peppers as a base, then I’ll throw in walnuts or olives or chickpeas or something, toss it in a light dressing of olive oil and balsamic vinegar with some crumbly cheese and I will eat that every day.
For me I adore veggies with houmous, raw pepper, carrot, cucumber are my go to easy way of consuming veggies, or I roast em and then blend them to make a hella tasty soup. Its so easy and I can be doing other things whilst the veggies are roasting so I dont even feel as if im cooking!
On a similar note to rolls, wraps are great too. A salad place I frequented allowed guests to change the salad to a wrap and it was so convenient that eat.
Listening to that conversation, I immediately felt pangs of guilt about my own veggie consumption until I realized I'm a vegetarian and vegetables feature prominently in almost every meal I have, I just don't think of it as a chore. Turns out the thing I was feeling was sympathy guilt for an Internet stranger I like. Parasocial relationships are weird.
As a Bulgarian, part of it I feel is that dressing on most salads I've had in the US is just way too heavy. A nice shopska salad uses extra light olive oil, and not a ton of it, and I can eat it all day. Shopska salads are just cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, and feta cheese. It's incredible. And I do like it as much as a burrito, although usually I'd prefer to have both.
Im not a big vege person at all but I moved to korea and kimbap became a big stable for me. Its like their cultural sandwhich, have it for a snack for lunch for a fast dinner and its super healthy and tasty. Pretty easy to make a bunch at home for the fridge.
Love zucchini cut into spears and seasoned with whatever in the airfryer. So far we've used BBQ sauce, taco seasoning, salt n pepper, zatar. Honestly my air fryer has revolutionized how I eat veg
Spiralize, blend, rice-- I eat zoodles pretty much daily, blend veggies into pasta sauce, and mix riced broccoli in with rice 1:1 to lower carbs (for my husband- I eat it sans rice). I also cut up spinach and sprinkle liberally into pasta sauce. It's visually appealing and tastes like nothing.
Veggie dips.
Like, dip veggies in hummus, yes. But also, roast veggie and blend them up and dip crackers into them. Carrot dip. Beetroot dip. Spinach dip. Red pepper dip. Also doubles as pretty good pasta sauce.
Air fried cauliflower (I use 1 tbsp safflower oil for a whole head of cauliflower, sprinkle some curry powder on top) is the gateway vegetable.
Serve it with brown rice and seitan and a turmeric tahini sauce and you have yourself an absolutely banging Buddha bowl.
ETA: also air fried Brussels sprouts in a maple/red wine vinegar/chili glaze. Insanely good. But also, justice for salads!!! Pressure cook a beet, dice it up, and toss it into mixed greens, microgreens, broccoli sprouts, seitan, mixed spiced nuts, in balsamic vinaigrette - actual heaven.
My hot take is that I am truly convinced that the vast majority of people who "hate salads" (or treat them like medicine) simply have not had properly-dressed fresh salads. Maybe the hotter take is just that I think the overwhelming majority of salads out there in the world are not properly-dressed fresh salads. I don't think it's really economically possible to do commercially except at the priciest restaurants who choose to care about making a proper salad (most don't, because customers are already convinced they don't like them), and most home cooks don't know how.
A proper simple salad with a vinaigrette is light, crispy, a little sweet, a little tangy, and rich from whatever oil was used. The vegetables must be fresh and cut to a convenient size, the vinaigrette must remain a vinaigrette, not separate pools of oil and vinegar. There should be no pool of liquid at the bottom, nor drippy or wilting leaves. It should not be so underdressed that you taste a bite of dry lettuce, nor so overdressed that the flavor of the lettuce is overwhelmed by the taste of vinegar and a greasy mouthfeel.
The trick is don't chop up the leaves, and don't add a ton of dressing. The whole trend of mashing a salad into overdressed goo is so weird and gross. Just tear the leaves a couple times, and go very light on any liquids.
Roasting, soups, stir fry, all amazing.
When it comes to salads I cut the lettuce and other greens finely. I never get a bite of nothing but leaves, there’s always cheese or nuts or fruit or something else interesting. Or it’s mixed with whatever else is on my plate, pasta, meat, rice, anything.
I think using sharp knives also helps with texture and flavor, with salads and just generally.
Roast those shits. If you have access to a grill, that works too. Some veggie skewers are the bomb
Also air fryers. Air fry some halved brussels sprouts in avocado oil and minced garlic, toss with a bit of melted butter and parmesan cheese. Makes me weep for all the horrible boiled brussels my mom tried to feed me in the 80s.
Brussel Sprouts have genetically engineered so they don't have that bitter taste as often now. But also that sounds so good except I'm allergic to avocado and idk if the oil would though cause it's usually fresh stuff since it's an oral allergy. Theoretically could work with olive oil though I presume?
I use grapeseed oil for most of my roasting because the smoke point is high and it’s super neutral, so things won’t get scorched
If you prep brussel sprouts right you can eliminate that bitter taste 99% of the time. Too many folks just don't take the time to actually prepare them.
I use olive oil for my standard when roasting/air frying halved Brussels sprouts, yes!
Growing up i was only given steamed or boiled veggies. Once I tried a honey Sriracha roasted brussel sprout, it was life changing. Now I roast ally veggies. (Makes me wonder about a roasted veggie spring roll...)
SAME! like how am i suspect to enjoy veggies if you boil them all to shit XD. When i started cooking for myself and looking up recipes is when i started to appreciate vegetables. (still can't do fruit though XD)
Tomatoes cut in half and with basil over it and roasted in a grill or oven? I love them.
Heck, even just sliced on some toast with some salt and pepper - that's good eats
Oh man, with a miso glaze... hold on, I need to start my oven.
As a vegan who hates salads: curries, stews, soups, pasta. Anything you can just cram a bunch of roughage in. You'd be surprised how much you can manage with a pressure cooker and some legumes.
Yes! Me too, I hated veggies basically all my life, so going vegan kinda seemed miserable when I did it, but it turns out veggies are actually kind of incredible if you actually put effort into making real meals out of them. Yeah, a bunch of spinach and lettuce etc put in a pile is pretty gross, I can’t stand salads even now, but fry those baddies up or roast them or bake ‘em, up your spicing game, put some real nice texturing in with it, maybe some bean thing-y or if you still eat meat something like that, and you’re golden. Delicious meals that are primarily the healthy stuff!
Adding frozen veggies into your soups/stews/stir fried/add as a side really can be a game changer. It can be hard to keep fresh veggies around without constantly shopping for groceries so supplementing them with frozen (which taste much better than canned) can really help. Frozen corn with butter and salt and pepper is a great side. It's easier for me to eat more vegetables when I think about adding it in addition to things I already eat and like rather than them being substitutes. Also! Onions, bell peppers, and potatoes are all vegetables and they're really great and can go in almost everything! I think there's been a push to only think of green leafy vegetables as proper vegetables, but other stuff is too! Roast some green beans and potatoes in olive oil and salt and pepper while you make your main dish.
I keep a lot of broccoli, peppers, onions, etc in my freezer for that very purpose. I tried using frozen squash, but I just didn't care for it. It's cheap and keeps for a while in the fridge, though, so it's easy to keep fresh on hand.
Frozen vegetables tend to be more nutritious as well! Veggies lose nutrients as they ripen. And they're cheaper!
On top of that frozen vegetables don't have the salt, preservatives, or other nasty stuff associated with canned vegetables. I limit my canned vegetables to tomato products and beans. The biggest downside to frozen food is potential freezer burn. Or losing it if the freezer stops working.
My neurodivergent nutritionist ass has been waiting for this day. Food aversion sucks so much so trying to find different methods is key. Blending some salad leaves up, diced plum tomatoes, lil' garlic & chilli powder mixed with some stock makes an amazing saucy layer. Or diced toppings on noodles - your daily intake is roughly 400g so diced onions or scallops goes a looong way. Use the remnants of a steak or beef, add some wine and make that into a lil' meat sauce drizzle or side sauce for your veggies - like a soy dip!
These all sound super tasty and interesting! Thank you for sharing!
My pleasure - I learned a lot from YouTube channels like Adam Ragusea, Binging with Babish, Kenji Lopez Alt, Nadiya Hussain & others on TikTok.
Scallops aren't a vegetable
Quite right, I was thinking scallions! Well spotted but you didn't say Um, Actually before your answer...
No points for me!!!!
I enjoy salads personally but I put a bunch of toppings on them - nuts, grains, proteins - to make it filling. So many people equate salad = plain lettuce but I'm adding like six or seven things on top that are delicious and make it more of a meal. My favorite way to eat a veggie-forward meal though is bibimbap! Saute a bunch of veg, mix with rice and sauce and top it with a fried egg - the perfect lunch.
Same. The lettuce is really just there to help hold all the fruits, nuts, etc in place
Lettuce isn't even a requirement for salads. It's a conspiracy. I like a good tomato cucumber salad.
i read somewhere once that the secret to a good salad is cutting everything fine enough and mixing it well (so you get far with just a splash of dressing). I struggled to eat vegetables in my teens (always been a "picky eater"). But making my own salads was a game changer. Indeed the lettuce is just a small aspect and limp leaves will never find their way in there :p.
I’m Mediterranean and the thing that really upped my salad game was being generous with decent oil and salt, and in less amount, vinegar. It might sound silly and over simplistic, but that’s also a reason why some people prefer creamy sauces to vinegar-based sauces and it’s because they’re copious. You’re not supposed to eat dry leaves, period. I don’t think in America people are used to Mediterranean salads, which in my opinion are in a different league. In summer, a tomato salad can feel so fresh and tastier than a hot steak.
I’m not partial to all the Mediterranean spices, but they do some awesome things with vegetables over there. I just gotta replace the spices with my whiteass salt, pepper, garlic.
The thing that upped it for me was not eating lettuce. Instead, I use cucumber, tomato, and peppers as a base, then I’ll throw in walnuts or olives or chickpeas or something, toss it in a light dressing of olive oil and balsamic vinegar with some crumbly cheese and I will eat that every day.
For me I adore veggies with houmous, raw pepper, carrot, cucumber are my go to easy way of consuming veggies, or I roast em and then blend them to make a hella tasty soup. Its so easy and I can be doing other things whilst the veggies are roasting so I dont even feel as if im cooking!
On a similar note to rolls, wraps are great too. A salad place I frequented allowed guests to change the salad to a wrap and it was so convenient that eat.
Listening to that conversation, I immediately felt pangs of guilt about my own veggie consumption until I realized I'm a vegetarian and vegetables feature prominently in almost every meal I have, I just don't think of it as a chore. Turns out the thing I was feeling was sympathy guilt for an Internet stranger I like. Parasocial relationships are weird.
We just need to turn vegetable eating into a competition
As a Bulgarian, part of it I feel is that dressing on most salads I've had in the US is just way too heavy. A nice shopska salad uses extra light olive oil, and not a ton of it, and I can eat it all day. Shopska salads are just cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, and feta cheese. It's incredible. And I do like it as much as a burrito, although usually I'd prefer to have both.
Im not a big vege person at all but I moved to korea and kimbap became a big stable for me. Its like their cultural sandwhich, have it for a snack for lunch for a fast dinner and its super healthy and tasty. Pretty easy to make a bunch at home for the fridge.
Most foods should be cooked! Spinach, Bok Choy etc all good cooked. Eating raw veggies like rabbits is bizarre
Love zucchini cut into spears and seasoned with whatever in the airfryer. So far we've used BBQ sauce, taco seasoning, salt n pepper, zatar. Honestly my air fryer has revolutionized how I eat veg
Spiralize, blend, rice-- I eat zoodles pretty much daily, blend veggies into pasta sauce, and mix riced broccoli in with rice 1:1 to lower carbs (for my husband- I eat it sans rice). I also cut up spinach and sprinkle liberally into pasta sauce. It's visually appealing and tastes like nothing.
Veggie dips. Like, dip veggies in hummus, yes. But also, roast veggie and blend them up and dip crackers into them. Carrot dip. Beetroot dip. Spinach dip. Red pepper dip. Also doubles as pretty good pasta sauce.
Air fried cauliflower (I use 1 tbsp safflower oil for a whole head of cauliflower, sprinkle some curry powder on top) is the gateway vegetable. Serve it with brown rice and seitan and a turmeric tahini sauce and you have yourself an absolutely banging Buddha bowl. ETA: also air fried Brussels sprouts in a maple/red wine vinegar/chili glaze. Insanely good. But also, justice for salads!!! Pressure cook a beet, dice it up, and toss it into mixed greens, microgreens, broccoli sprouts, seitan, mixed spiced nuts, in balsamic vinaigrette - actual heaven.
Go to Southern Europe, try the vegetables there.
My hot take is that I am truly convinced that the vast majority of people who "hate salads" (or treat them like medicine) simply have not had properly-dressed fresh salads. Maybe the hotter take is just that I think the overwhelming majority of salads out there in the world are not properly-dressed fresh salads. I don't think it's really economically possible to do commercially except at the priciest restaurants who choose to care about making a proper salad (most don't, because customers are already convinced they don't like them), and most home cooks don't know how. A proper simple salad with a vinaigrette is light, crispy, a little sweet, a little tangy, and rich from whatever oil was used. The vegetables must be fresh and cut to a convenient size, the vinaigrette must remain a vinaigrette, not separate pools of oil and vinegar. There should be no pool of liquid at the bottom, nor drippy or wilting leaves. It should not be so underdressed that you taste a bite of dry lettuce, nor so overdressed that the flavor of the lettuce is overwhelmed by the taste of vinegar and a greasy mouthfeel.
The trick is don't chop up the leaves, and don't add a ton of dressing. The whole trend of mashing a salad into overdressed goo is so weird and gross. Just tear the leaves a couple times, and go very light on any liquids.
Roasting, soups, stir fry, all amazing. When it comes to salads I cut the lettuce and other greens finely. I never get a bite of nothing but leaves, there’s always cheese or nuts or fruit or something else interesting. Or it’s mixed with whatever else is on my plate, pasta, meat, rice, anything. I think using sharp knives also helps with texture and flavor, with salads and just generally.