Veg For Victory With Ella’s Kitchen

When I was weaning Toby and Teddy most of their first tastes were vegetables. I wanted them to both grow up loving vegetables and enjoying their food – much like me. As a mum, my priority was to ensure their diets are nutritional, healthy but most of all tasty. Now I’ll do anything to get something green past Toby’s lips because he is becoming quite the challenge to feed. Teddy is much more receptive to what’s on his plate and will happily eat most things in sight.

When weaning, and even now, Ella’s Kitchen played a core role in ensuring that if I was running behind and couldn’t provide a quick and nutritional meal for whatever reason, they could! While we’ve moved on from the vegetable puree pouches, Ted still absolutely adores their fruit puree pouches for dessert or if we’re out on a picnic.

So when Ella’s Kitchen asked if I’d like to be part of their ‘Veg For Victory’ (#VegForVictory) campaign, I was absolutely over the moon. They challenged us to offer a different vegetable to the boys every day for two whole weeks. Research shows it can take quite a few times before you like a new food and I was up for broadening Teddy’s diet, as well as offering Toby an alternative vegetable each night to see if he’d actually give them a go.

I usually put at least ‘something’ vegetable wise on their plates, even if I know they won’t eat them because I believe that by offering them the choice they don’t feel pressured and they don’t get told off if they don’t eat it and Veg For Victory has completely ensured that for the past fortnight

Want to know what we were sent? I knew you would!

I started with something really simple that I knew both boys would eat, and that’s broccoli. Having said that, Toby doesn’t always choose to eat it but will if he’s encouraged with an aeroplane or train. We’d potty trained recently and he’d been doing really well with stickers so thought it’d be a good idea to try and continue this trend and reward him if he tried a new food. Toby’s problem is that he will usually sniff something and tell me it’s ‘yuck’ before it even passes his lips, which is really frustrating! However, we have had some success with making a huge fuss and getting something to touch his tongue, although the result is usually the same – gagging.

Teddy, on the other hand, is quite happy to demolish any vegetables on his plate first, as though they were going out of fashion! We tried a variety of dishes throughout the two weeks – ones where the vegetables were left as they are, such as sweet potato fries, and others where the vegetables were more or less hidden, such as chicken, courgette and lentil curry.

Unfortunately over the course of the two weeks, Toby would absolutely not touch any other vegetable – even with the reward chart and stickers that Ella’s Kitchen had sent over. Teddy, on the other hand, loved the sweet potato fries and green beans (they were definitely his favourites) as well as roast potatoes and carrots and managed to accumulate lots of stickers which I’m sure he’s very pleased with!

To find out more about the Ella’s Kitchen ‘Veg For Victory’ campaign, you can head over and see what it’s all about and even challenge yourself to offer your kids a new vegetable each day for two weeks! Get involved with the #vegforvictory hashtag and reading their Greener Paper!

How did you get your little ones to eat their vegetables if they turned fussy? And if they love them, what’s their favourite? #VegForVictory