An Adult’s Guide to Finally Learning to Love Vegetables

Vegetables are an essential part of a healthy diet , but getting enough vegetables can be a challenge for those of us who, frankly, never learned to love them. I used to be a vegetable hater, so I totally understand that. But you can learn to love vegetables even if you despised them as a child.

If you imagine a banquet full of the same awful-tasting dishes that turned up your nose as a child, relax. There are two important things to remember. Firstly, there are many more vegetable dishes in the universe than you have already tried, and some of them will surely appeal to your taste.

Second, our tastes do change over time. Most of us go through a picky stage in childhood and then widen our tastes a bit during adolescence and early adulthood. As we age, we also tend to taste bitter less strongly . This is good news if you’ve always felt that Brussels sprouts or broccoli are too bitter to taste. I rediscovered a lot of vegetables when I was in my twenties, and when I was in my thirties, I found myself on the opposite end of the pickiness spectrum, eating just about everything I used to hate, even black licorice.

So, here are a few things to try if you’re ready to take the leap.

Add Something Delicious

If you’re interested in starting to eat vegetables because they’re healthy, don’t worry about eating them the “healthy” way at first. The fact that you eat vegetables at all is the healthy part . So go ahead and oil them.

This doesn’t mean you should always eat this vegetable with butter, forever , but it’s a great way to enjoy a vegetable. You can always try “healthier” recipes later. In a Reddit thread titled “What recipe made you change your mind about a vegetable you didn’t like?” , many recipes come down to simply dousing vegetables with oil:

Get drunk and fry the mushrooms in oil…

[zucchini] grate lengthwise, then fry in oil and chopped bacon

Pan-fried [cauliflower or Brussels sprouts] with lots of oil, garlic and salt is also good.

Asparagus in a pan fried with butter and garlic.

And now I can’t remember why I used to hate beets…especially when I cook roasted beets, sweet potatoes and carrots with olive oil and rosemary garlic oil!

If any of this sounds good to you, just do it. Butter, garlic, herbs, and bacon are great choices. Salt makes everything taste better and even suppresses bitterness . Maybe all you need is to take a vegetable, any vegetable, and take a dip in the oil pool.

Or choose any other flavor you like. Cheese is a good option: toss Parmesan over cauliflower, goat cheese over beets, or gosh, dip a bag of vegetable mix into a queso. A certain person, whom I will not name and to whom I am definitely not married, apparently once enjoyed (!) broccoli dipped in a jar of vanilla icing. Now please try to forget that I just typed this sentence and let’s move on.

Try the opposite texture

If you’ve only ever eaten soft broccoli, try blanching it to reduce the bitterness and lighten the color. Blanched broccoli, asparagus, and other green vegetables look great on a raw plate ( what real Pennsylvanians call a veggie plate, but we digress ), and it also gives you the option to dip them in ranch, hummus, or another delicious meal of your choice. .

Or maybe you prefer your vegetables to be a little more cooked. If you have only eaten soft green beans from a can, take a few fresh green beans and steam them until they are slightly soft but still crunchy.

It’s generally worth trying any texture that is the opposite of how you’ve eaten that vegetable in the past. Life hacker food writer Ellie Chanthorn Reinmann says she never really liked eggplant until “I tried Chinese style eggplant stew in spicy garlic sauce (satisfying my mild needs) and it changed me.”

Try new vegetables

You don’t have to review all the vegetables you didn’t like in the past. Go to the grocery store or farmers market and start over. Perhaps you have never tried canola , celery or spaghetti squash. Right now!

Try different dishes, especially if you can order them in buffet style. If you didn’t eat a lot of, say, Indian food as a child, you may find that the buffet of an Indian restaurant has new flavors for you without any of the emotional baggage of your past experiences.

Also: steal. “If I went out to dinner with friends, I would ask them to try the vegetables from their plates,” writes former vegan hater Steve Kamb of Nerd Fitness. Dishes prepared in a restaurant are usually delicious, and one serving is unlikely. If you don’t like that borrowed sweet potato slice, just wash it down with a sip of your drink and go back to your own safe food.

cut lettuce

If you’ve always been intimidated by salads, it’s time to tackle this one. A good salad dressing will make almost any vegetable taste delicious, and you can vary the ingredients, including those you already like (like bacon and eggs). – components of the classic Cobb salad).

Our Senior Food Editor Claire Lower suggests chopping up your salads for a more friendly meal. “I always cut the lettuce with kitchen scissors to cut it into small pieces,” she says. This way, it’s easy to eat a fork of mixed ingredients instead of struggling with single lettuce leaves or oversized pieces of vegetables.

Add some acid

Another tip from Claire: Drip a little vinegar or lemon juice on any vegetable. “It really refreshes the dish and balances out the heavy ‘vegetable’ flavors,” she says. That’s why salad dressings are acidic, but you can also squeeze lemon on cooked vegetables. Asparagus and other green vegetables are especially helpful.

Try a sweet vegetable

If you don’t like bitter and salty tastes, go for the sweet option. Carrots, sweet potatoes, beets, winter squash, and corn have some sweetness. You can cook them in a way that mixes sweetness with other flavors, such as adding butter and salt to corn.

Or you can rely on sweetness. Baked sweet potatoes are good only with butter, but also with brown sugar and cinnamon. Or roast some carrots and parsnips together and drizzle with honey (and maybe cayenne pepper) to finish.

Roast them with garlic salt

When in doubt, roast the vegetables. This treatment benefits both sweet and savory vegetables. It’s also one of the easiest ways to cook vegetables, requiring only a few minutes of prep time and the most basic pantry ingredients.

We have a guide , but the basic idea is that you place the chopped vegetables on a tray, drizzle with oil, and sprinkle generously with garlic salt or seasonings of your choice. Bake until the insides are soft and the outside is a little crispy and try to enjoy. Chances are you will.