Eat More Fruits and Vegetables Challenge

Fruits and veggies have so many health benefits, but sometimes it's difficult to get them into our diets on a daily basis. Well, today we're joining in on Laura's Challenge by sharing some of the ways we eat more fruits and veggies at our house.


Fruit & Veggie Smoothies
Smoothies are a daily occurrence in our home. All of us love Green Smoothies, but we also like to experiment with different fruit concoctions. We also enjoy Peanut Butter Banana Smoothies on occasion. We usually stock up on bananas when they are on sale and keep frozen banana slices in the fridge. The frozen fruit bananas really give smoothies a creamy consistency. We also have been freezing strawberries from our garden this year.


Salads
We're trying to eat a main dish salad every day this summer. Right now, we're probably averaging 4 or 5 main dish salads every week. We'd like to increase this to at least one salad every day. You can join in on the fun and find some great salad recipes at our A Slew of Summer Salads Carnival.

Two of our favorite salads are the Fresh Asian Noodle Salad and the Grilled Margarita Chicken Salad. We've eaten these salad numerous times and have served them to guests who have also greatly enjoyed them.


Homemade Pizza
By making our our pizza we can increase the amount of vegetable we eat while enjoying a meal that everyone likes. You can easily include pureed carrots in the pizza sauce, add finely chopped vegetables under the cheese, or load the top with vegetables of your choice. We recently tried a Tropical Pizza that we enjoyed.


Soups
We're hoping to get enough yellow squash out of the garden this year to make a couple large batches of Summer Squash Soup which includes a variety of vegetables. This soup is great served with BLTs or your favorite crusty bread.


Healthy Sides
Emahry and I love these Sweet Potato Fries although Tim isn't a huge fan. I only wish I knew how to get them crispy without frying them. We also love this quick and easy Chunky Crock-Pot Applesauce. I'm not sure how it would freeze because we've always cleaned out the entire crock-pot with two days.

We hope you enjoy these ideas and that they will help you add more fruits and veggies to your diet.