Learn how to make vegetables taste good – from choosing the best quality to using the ideal cooking technique for the best flavor. Even picky eaters will learn to love their veggies!

“I don’t like vegetables.”

It’s a phrase I commonly hear which breaks my heart. Yes, I’m emotional about your eating habits.

I’m a firm believer of fueling your body with quality food. I also feel strongly you should love what you eat! So today I’ll first convince you why you should love veggies, and then I’ll show you how to love them.

Vegetables are Good for You

Maybe this comes as a surprise, but mother was right: broccoli is good for you.

Of all of the diets out there (check out my review on some of the most popular fad diet trends), study after study shows a common denominator between all of them: long-term healthy diets contain lots of vegetables.

Eating patterns which contain lots of plants (i.e. vegetables) have been linked to all of the following:

• Reduced risk of heart disease, including heart attack and stroke

• Improved digestion and less risk of diverticulitis

• Improvements in all kinds of labs: lower blood pressure, cholesterol, triglycerides, to name a few

• Lower risk of some types of cancer

Let’s be clear: it’s not just the nutrients in vegetables which are good for you. It’s the actual vegetables themselves. Vitamin, fiber, and phytochemical supplements which claim to replace the goodness of vegetables have never proven themselves equal to eating the real food – even when they say they are made from vegetables.

Nothing is as good as nature made it, my friends!

Healthy Food Should Taste Good

There are lots of reasons diets don’t work (which is why I practice an Intuitive Eating approach to nutrition coaching), but a big reason is because often times “diet food” tastes terrible. Even just the phrase “diet food” conjures up images of boiled chicken and tasteless baby carrots.

Yuck.

Instead, as I always encourage my clients – when you think about your eating pattern, you should be excited to eat this way for the rest of your life! If a diet plan feels anything other than exciting, run – don’t walk – in the other direction.

Nourishing your body appropriately means including lots of fruits and veggies… which means those fruits and veggies need to taste delicious! Sound impossible? Don’t worry; even if you’ve never liked a green vegetable in your life, I can help you change that. There are two important ingredients for making vegetables taste their best:

1. Choosing seasonal produce – which helps ensure the highest quality vegetable to start with (download this Seasonal Vegetable Guide to know what’s in season right now)

2. Use a cooking technique to enhance the natural flavor of vegetables (see next section)

Not all Cooking Techniques are Created Equal

If you’ve ever had the (very common) experience of not liking a vegetable, it may not be because of the vegetable itself, but rather how it was cooked.

Don’t take my word for it, just think about what you know about how you like (or dislike) some of these foods:

Would you rather eat stir-fry beef or boiled beef?
Boiled dumplings or pan-fried dumplings?
Boiled chicken or grilled chicken?

There’s no need to understand the chemical processes behind why your choices taste better, but I’ll give you a hint: it’s a little fat + high cooking temperature. Maillard Browning is the fancy, scientific name for this browning effect that occurs when cooking food at high temperatures and exactly what makes your food taste good.

Cooking at high temperatures actually breaks down some of the starches in the vegetables into sugar. While this doesn’t make vegetables tastes sweet, it does help cut the bitterness most of us associate with stinky veggies like broccoli or asparagus.

Go check out the recipes for Crowd-Pleasing Roasted Broccoli and Easy (and Delicious) Sautéed Brussels Sprouts to learn more.

How to Roast All the Vegetables

Are you convinced? Good. Now let me teach you how to make my most favorite food(s) ever.

Roasting vegetables is a skill every home cook should learn. It’s simple, it’s easy. It’s the most painless way I’ve found to get everyone around the table to eat their veggies (I’m looking at you, Jeremy).

Now you must try – and tell me how it goes! Just three simple steps:

Step 1: Prepare your veggies. Wash ‘em, scrub ‘em, peel ‘em (but only if you must – the peel usually contains the most nutrition!). Then cut ‘em, slice ‘em, or cube ‘em and throw them on a baking sheet.

Step 2: Toss veggies with oil + seasonings. Oil is a flavor carrier. It makes food taste good – and you want to love your veggies, right? You don’t need a lot, but enough so they’re glistening a little and have enough moisture for the seasonings to stick. Pro tip: use your favorite meat seasoning to flavor your veggies. I love taco seasoning on roasted cabbage or steak seasoning on cauliflower. Yum!

Step 3: Roast! Turn your oven up to “hot” – usually somewhere between 400-450 degrees Fahrenheit. Heartier veggies (carrots, potatoes, winter squash) take a little longer – usually between 20-30 minutes – while delicate ones (cabbage, asparagus, summer squash) a little less time – usually 10-15 minutes. Stir veggies half-way through cooking to ensure even browning.

Serve up hot with your favorite entrée. Package leftovers in individual containers for easy meal prep for the days ahead!

Download this Seasonal Vegetable Guide to pick out the vegetables which are best for this time of year and use this 3-step process to try something new this week.

Happy veggie enjoying!

Ann from Peas and Hoppiness