Here are a few ideas on how to get more nutrients out of your food and more vegetables into your diet.

When your buying salad greens choose a wide variety- baby spinach, rocket, kale, romaine, Swiss chard, beet greens.... NOT iceberg because it’s not very nutritious. 

Sprouts are packed full of nutrients. You can buy them but it’s much cheaper to sprout them yourself.  (Could be cool exercise to do with kids) You tube it!

Make sure you have some fat with your salads as this is helps your body to absorb the nutrients- Fetta, olives, avocado, olive oil, avocado oil, walnut oil,  The fat pulls the nutrients out of the greens. 

Add seeds/nuts to your salads- walnuts/ pumpkin seeds/pecans/macadamia nuts.

If you buy a salad dressing, make sure it doesn’t have sugar in it. BUT it’s so easy to make your  own and will cost less with no preservatives.

My favourite dressing at the moment is olive oil, apple cider vinegar, seeded mustard and a small clove of garlic & little honey or maple syrup. (Aldi sell 100% maple syrup)

Avocado, basil, olive oil, apple cider vinegar blended together. 

Olive oil & lemon. 

Pesto- Bunch of basil, olive oil, pine nuts/macadamia, parmesan cheese, garlic.... You can mix this into a bowl of steamed vegetables, have it on toast. Use like a dip. 

Buy raw honey, preferably not from the supermarket. Some store bought honey has recently been found to have glucose added to it. 

Farmers markets usually have raw honey and vegetables that are alive as they have usually been harvested that day.

Make your own hummus and eat with celery, carrot, cucumber sticks or home made crackers.

Chickpeas-canned or fresh. Canned have a lot of salt and as such need to be rinsed thoroughly. Cheaper to buy uncooked chickpeas and soak them overnight than boil them up the next day. Then you can freeze them in batches ready to add to salads or make more hummus. Chickpeas, garlic, tahini, olive oil, S & P, juice of a lemon. 

If you don’t have one, a noodle gadget is a good investment. I like the hand held variety the fits in your utensil drawer as apposed to the win that lives in the cupboard and needs to be pulled out and set up.  It makes noodles out of zucchini or carrots. You can add them to a salad or into a stock or soup instead of actual noodles. Use them like pasta. 

Kids seem to like the noodles to! Whilst we don’t want to lie to our kids they maybe none the wiser if they think they are orange noodles….

Omelettes stuffed with vegetables.