How is the Fruit and Vegetable Challenge going for you? Here’s hoping you loaded up your kitchen with lots of fresh and frozen produce and you’ve been enjoying a wide variety the past few days!

To encourage you on this journey, I wanted to share a few tricks I’ve learned to help my family get plenty of colorful, nutrient-filled, fruit and vegetable variety. It’s obvious that you should be serving side dishes of fruits and/or vegetables at every meal. But sometimes, that’s still not enough servings each day. We often eat them for snacks, so that gives us bonus fruits and veggies. But how about these ideas to get a wide variety and a large quantity:

1. Make Stir Fry

Our favorite recipe is this one: Easy Noodle Stir Fry. All four of my kids gobble this down, and there are usually three or four different vegetables included.

2. Eat Salads Often

There are so many different variety of greens, and so many fun and delicious add-ins to a salad. Homemade dressing makes salads amazing.

3. Make Smoothies

There’s no limit to what you can toss into a smoothie. (Okay, fine. I wouldn’t blend in a piece of steak. Tuna, maybe. Kidding! I’m talking fruit here.)  You can get several servings of fruit and even veggies (by adding spinach or other fresh greens) in a smoothie.

4. Make Soup

Vegetable soup is an obvious way to get several servings in one meal. But any soup can be a great veggie source if you just add them in.

What other ways have you found to get lots of fruit and vegetables servings into one meal?

How is the Fruit and Vegetable Challenge going for you so far? Hopefully you’ve been adding plenty of the good stuff to your shopping cart and to your plate.

We’ve had fun taking pictures the past two weeks of some of our yummy, fruit and veggie filled meals. Chicken Salad on a One Hour Whole Wheat Yeast Roll with lettuce, cucumbers, sweet peppers, and grapes was such a delicious lunch several days ago! It made me feel like it was summer time – except for the fact that it was below zero outside. Details, details.

Once the kids saw me taking pictures that day, they decided to get in on the act! Justus (age 13) decided to “build a masterpiece” with all the fresh goodies available for our lunch that day:

Not to worry, he had seconds, thirds, and fourths before leaving the table.
He is almost 14, you know.

Malachi (age 9) saw what Justus was doing and said that he would make a masterpiece too. It is with much excitement that I present to you…The Grape:

After Malachi took his masterpiece picture and ate his enormous serving of grape, he created another pretty plateful:

I think we’ve been grape deprived. Our family ate almost the entire bag I bought during this one lunch. Why am I shocked? Two teenage boys, a 12 year old boy, a 9 year old boy, and a hard working dad? Of course we ate the whole bag.

One great way I find to include additional veggies in a meal is to add plenty of onions, carrots, and leeks in our homemade chicken broth. Then, I blend them all up into the broth, making it smooth and rich in veggies. It is so flavorful this way! For one of our meals, I cooked rice in this kind of broth, which turns it orange (from the carrots blended in). I added chicken and cream, much like this Creamy Chicken and Rice Casserole, and called it dinner.

Here’s another meal we had last week with this good broth, Potato Soup. There are veggies in the broth (not to mention all the other wonderful nutrients from the chicken bones), veggies in the soup, plus we all had a bowl full of salad before we filled our bowl with soup.

A great way to encourage my kids to eat fruit for snacks is to set out a huge bowl of options on our table. Not only is it tempting, it really brightens up the kitchen! Because I think that fruit on a table is a decoration (as well as food to be eaten, of course), I obsessively remove all produce stickers once I bring it home from the store. A sticker on my kiwi is not cute or appetizing, in my opinion.

A few days ago I burned us some grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch. Yep, I burned them all. The phone rang, someone came to the door, I have no idea what else happened when it was sandwich flipping time. Oh well, we all still ate them. I put out a plate of fruit, plus we had tomato soup to dip our burnt sandwiches in. Looks like we had about 20 left to go on this fruit plate. Nice!

Usually I steam broccoli and carrots, but for fun, I decided to roast them to go with our meal of spaghetti. Delicious! I’m making it a goal to serve salads with almost every evening meal. This is such a great way for us to get plenty of raw greens.

What delicious ways have you found to serve fruits and veggies this week?  We’ll check back in Monday to see how the Fruit and Vegetable Challenge is going for you!