Vegetables are a great source of vitamins and minerals. The problem is that you often have to tell your kids hundreds of times to eat their vegetables and they still aren’t happy about it.

For some reason, children have an aversion to vegetables. They will cry and sit for hours before you finally give in and send them from the table.

Vegetables do not have to be the enemy. All you need to do is find a creative way to cook them and your family will love them - guaranteed!

Do you remember when you were a child and your mother dropped a soggy green lump of cabbage on your plate. Did you want to eat it? Almost certainly not.

There are various ways to encourage your children to eat their vegetables. You might even need to trick them! Broccoli is an example of a vegetable, which is high in vitamin and mineral content, and there are plenty of ways to prepare it. Here are some tips:

Try it raw. Leave a plate of raw broccoli in bite-size pieces in the refrigerator for your children as a snack. Offer some salad dressing so they can dip it and this is often a hit. Leave the tips of the broccoli on the plate and encourage your child to eat them. You can even make a creative game of this. Grilled vegetable recipes are not the only way to serve healthy vegetables.

Bribery - you might like to tell your child that if they finish their broccoli, there is a treat for them afterwards. Always follow up on this promise and produce the treat else they will mistrust future promises from you.

Use cheese. Cheese and broccoli go very well together. If you pour a cheese sauce over the broccoli, you are adding texture and changing the flavor. You might find your children eat the broccoli in cheese before whatever else you have served with it.

Lasagna is delicious with broccoli added. Smothering it in cheese can add to the flavor and disguise the broccoli. Children will be too busy enjoying the cheesy flavor to bother picking out the bits of broccoli. Vegetable pizza is another way of sneaking in broccoli. Nearly all kids love pizza so a healthy vegetable pizza recipe will produce something they associate with fun rather than veggies.

Chop it up - if all else fails, pre cook the broccoli and let it cool a little and put it in a food processor. Chop it up until it is not recognizable and add it to whatever dish you are cooking. Your children will not even know it is there.

Shakes - make a milkshake using ice cream milk and a lot of chocolate syrup. Add the broccoli to the shake as you are blending it. The taste of the chocolate will hide the taste of the broccoli. Just make sure that the ice cream that you use has chunks of something in it, that is not hard to find in grocery stores.

These are just some of the ways you can encourage your children to eat vegetables and get more vitamins, minerals, and nutrients into their diet.