12 Vegetables to Add In Your Diet (Besides Salads)

Peas

Frozen peas are great to have in your freezer because besides helping soothe bruises, 1 cup of peas has sufficient fibre, folate and iron for the day. However, it’s one of those veggies that often is badly cooked and causes us (yes, even the adults) to pick them out from our fried rice or neglect them from our plates. However, peas can taste great.

1. Make a mash and mix it with your mashed potatoes. You’ll be adding some antioxidants into your favourite mash and adding a sweeter flavour into the mix. Ratio of potato to pea is up to your comfort levels.
2. Make it into a dip. Similar to the beet suggestion, it will taste great mashed and mixed with hummus.

Corn

It is ironic that fructose corn syrup has no nutritional value but the corn kernels themselves are actually rich in vitamin C, lutein (who knew?) and fibre. It is doubtful that a lot of people have trouble eating this golden ears but in case of the picky ones, here are a couple of tips:

1. Make corn bread. Doesn’t taste of corn at all but yet retains all the goodness.
2. Make it into a soup, Chinese style. Add white fungus, red dates and wolfberries to sweeten the soup without needing a lot of stock.

Bok Choy/ Pak Choy/ Bai Cai

We Asians will normally just eat this stir fried with garlic and oyster sauce. Rich in vitamins K and C, it also contains potassium and is a neutral tasting vegetable. However, the long stems can get a bit fibrous if not cooked properly.

Shred it and mix it into meat balls or dumpling stuffing. It’ll give your meatballs a bit of texture but it only makes it more interesting!

Avocado

This green fruit has seen a recent surge in demand and a shortage recently in New Zealand. It’s no surprise because this fruit contains all the vitamins, minerals, fibre and even good oils that our bodies need. With its refreshing, creamy taste, is there a real need to sneak this into your diet?

Best way is to eat it raw – on toast with a nut butter of your choice (see Melissa’s Table Top Talk Episode 19); mashed up and seasoned with a bit of lemon juice, salt and pepper and added onto toast. If you want a warm or hot dish, you can bake an egg yolk in an halved avocado and just eating that with some salt and pepper.

Vegans have often used avocados and banana to create vegan ice cream because the creamy taste and texture is a good substitute for milk/cream. If you don’t want to freeze the avocado or blend it, simply chop up some avocado and drizzle it with chocolate sauce and syrup (we like to use gula melaka or palm sugar) before topping it off with some ginger snaps. Delicious dessert!

We hope you’ll now have some ideas on how to sneak in more nutrients and vegetables into your diet without even thinking that it’ll taste bad. Have fun experimenting with recipes and do let us know if you’ve created some with our tips!

Photo credits: Pixabay

Nutritional values extracted from: Nutrition Health Letter, WebMD.com and Wikipedia.