You have been told to always include a wide variety of fruits and vegetables in your diet so you can enjoy a wide spectrum of vitamins and minerals to gain the most nutritional boost for yourself.
But sometimes, it’s not just the type of veggies we purchase but also the ways in which we cook and incorporate them into our diet to ensure we maximize all their nutrients and wholesome goodness. So today in this post we will gonna tell you some interesting ways by which you can include more vegetables in your food.
1. Go Raw
As we all know, fresh is best this is because the least processed the vegetable, the more nutrients are retained in the food, hence being more beneficial for us.
If you have trained your taste buds to the refreshing sensation of raw vegetables like carrots, cucumbers, and capsicum then go ahead and keep going raw! Other leafy greens that have a subtle flavor include baby spinach, rocket leaves, and lettuce.
You can also drizzle lemon juice or balsamic vinegar in your salad mix for a more alkalizing and tastier meal.
2. Baking or Oven roast
Roast vegetables are one of the easiest ways to prepare your meals. These include root tubers like sweet potatoes, pumpkin, and others like corn, capsicum, mushrooms, and eggplant just to name a few. Sprinkle salt and pepper and a drizzle of olive oil to prevent the water-soluble and fat-soluble vitamins from seeping out.
If you’re being adventurous, prepare your home-baked kale chips with kale leaves, spices, and a little bit of oil for a tasty alkalizing snack!
3. Stew
A perfect all-in-one meal, vegetable stews are great for the family to enjoy and even better in colder seasons. Some veggies perfect for stews are root tubers, tomatoes, and corn.
To spice up your stew, add herbs and spices like garlic, onion, and black pepper just to name a few that are bursting with flavor and possess immunity-boosting properties.
Try not to add too much sodium to your stew as you should try and finish the entire meal to enjoy the full range of vitamins and minerals in this amazing dish.
4. Steam
Steaming is another simple way to prepare your veggies, with broccoli being one of the best candidates for this cooking method with its great source of Vitamin E, a fat-soluble vitamin hence will not easily leach out.
One way to gain more nutrition from this process is by using steaming water for other meals (i.e. cooking rice or vegetable soup). Some have also suggested adding lemon juice or cloves of garlic into the water so the steam will infiltrate and get absorbed into the vegetables for that touch of extra seasoning.
5. Gentle Stir Fry
Stir-frying is extremely popular in Asian cooking but more often than not produces a plate of limp-looking vegetables, dripping with oil.
Our suggestion is to only stir-frying small to medium-sized vegetables such as snow peas, sliced carrots, celery, bok choy, and bell peppers as they do not require long cooking times – a major cause of nutrients being destroyed, as well as using a spray- type oil which limits the amount of oil being used.
6. Blend
Cooking can be fairly time-consuming and we may not have all the time in the world to prepare a healthy yet nutritious meal. One of the easiest ways to achieve our daily greens is by blending our fresh fruits and vegetables to make a juice or smoothie.
Select high-water content and high-fiber fruits like watermelon, apple, orange, strawberries, spinach, celery, and beetroot to make a tropical sensation juice.
You can also select creamier foods like avocadoes, bananas, strawberries, mixed nuts, Medjool dates, mango, and greek natural yogurt for a more substantial drink that is still just as packed with nutrients to keep you going throughout your day!
7. Supplement powder alkalizing greens
Have you ever tried looking for snow peas and celery in winter or mandarins in summer? The availability of fresh produce can depend on seasonal variation, making it difficult for us to achieve all the vitamins and minerals our body requires to function effectively.
One convenient way to get around this problem is adding supplement greens powder that contains a wide variety of fruit and vegetable powders. Not only these powders are highly concentrated with high nutrient retention, their powdered form also makes it easier for your body to absorb all the nutritious goodness it contains.