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Healthy Snacks for Creative Kids: How to Get Them to Eat More Fruits and Vegetables

There’s no better way to encourage your child’s creativity than by letting them into the kitchen. With just a few ingredients, you can create some healthy combinations that will help meet your daily fruit and vegetable requirements. This may require a trip to the grocery store, or better yet, a trip to the garden.

With all the concerns about gluten allergies, you can make sandwiches without that boring bread. It’s amazing how far a sliced ​​cucumber will go in making perfect bite-sized sandwiches for your kids. Round or rectangular crackers will also work if gluten is not a concern.

Instead of mayonnaise, try low-fat cream cheese to help hold some of the layers of ingredients together. Small slices of grape or cherry tomatoes add color and everyone knows how good tomato and cheese taste together. If you have leaf lettuce or spinach, you can include those as well. Feel free to contribute slices of red, yellow, orange or green bell peppers to your masterpiece. It doesn’t get any healthier than that and guess what, everyone is eating vegetables!

Another creative idea is to include avocado slices. You can even mix the avocado with spices like paprika to add flavor (and lots of vitamins) or mix the avocado into the cream cheese spread. Treat this spread like you would a frosting and use it as a base to make faces using various vegetables in place of sprinkles. Cook some frozen mixed vegetables and rinse with cold water. Let your kids use the green beans, corn, peas, and carrots to make truly colorful creations. It doesn’t have to be just one face. You can make dominoes out of rectangular crackers and kernels of corn or peas (and work on some numbers) or make a geometric mosaic out of your cucumber.

You can go even further and use the bottoms of the peppers as baskets and fill them with vegetables and top with some cream cheese. Look, mom, you’ve created a vegetable muffin. Quick, go get the camera phone. Take photos for artistic posterity, vote for the best, and arrange them all on a fancy plate as if for a special occasion. Who needs a tea party?

Of course, you don’t want to forget about the fruit. Smoothies are a great way to add fruit to a meal. Bananas and berries mixed with some plain nonfat yogurt and ice cubes in the blender will make a colorful and creamy drink to help wash down those veggies.

Or wait, you might want to do this all over again tomorrow and use raisins, cranberries, and cranberries on a bed of graham crackers and peanut butter. Add even more seeds and nuts for protein. Think about the fruitful possibilities. Playing with food has become something you may want to encourage, and thanks to you, your children can see fruits and vegetables in a positively positive new light.