Last Tuesday night I stood in front of the fridge at 6:15, still in my netball training gear, trying to work out how to get something green into dinner without my youngest staging a full protest. Not a dramatic green. Not a weird green. Just… some plants. It sounds so simple until you’re actually doing it.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Not in a ‘completely overhaul everything’ way, but in a quiet, sustainable, Tuesday-night-is-real-life kind of way. Because the advice to ‘eat more vegetables’ is everywhere, and it’s genuinely good advice – the Australian Dietary Guidelines recommend adults aim for five serves of vegetables daily, and most of us are falling well short of that, but the gap between knowing and doing is where things fall apart for busy families.
So here’s what’s actually working in our house. Not perfection. Just progress.
Start with the meals you already make
The most effective thing I’ve done is stop trying to add new meals to the rotation and instead look at what we already cook, then quietly load more plants into those. Bolognese gets a full tin of lentils alongside the mince, which my kids genuinely don’t notice. Fried rice gets whatever vegetables I need to use up, finely diced. The Chicken and Vegetable Moussaka Bake on this site is a perfect example of that principle – familiar shape, plenty of vegetables tucked in.
This approach takes almost no extra time and zero extra convincing at the table. My youngest won’t touch a bowl of steamed broccoli. He’ll eat it invisible in a pasta sauce without blinking.
The key is cutting things small enough that they become part of the texture rather than a presence. A coarsely chopped zucchini is a thing to be argued about. Finely grated zucchini in a patty is just… dinner.
Keep frozen and tinned plants in constant rotation
Honestly, I’d be lost without my freezer. Frozen peas, frozen corn, frozen spinach, frozen edamame. They’re already prepped, they last, and they cost less than fresh equivalents most weeks. There’s no shame in this – nutritionally, frozen vegetables are picked and frozen quickly, so they hold most of their goodness. Dietitians often suggest that frozen can be just as valuable as fresh, and Better Health Victoria confirms that blanching before freezing preserves nutrients well.
Tinned legumes are the other thing I couldn’t live without. A tin of chickpeas or cannellini beans added to almost anything – soups, grain bowls, roasted trays – adds bulk, protein, and fibre without any prep time. The Tuscan Sun-Dried Tomato and Bean Broth here is one I make on rotation, exactly because it’s built around what I always have in the pantry.
Make vegetables worth eating at breakfast
This one took me a while to embrace, but it’s changed the tone of the whole day. I used to think breakfast was egg territory and vegetables started at lunch. Not anymore. Spinach wilted into eggs, cherry tomatoes alongside toast, half an avocado – these aren’t difficult additions, they’re just habits that take a few weeks to form.
The Spinach and ricotta baked eggs recipe is one I make on a slow Sunday and reheat on Monday morning. It doubles well for lunchboxes if you cut it into portions. And the Smashed avo with dukkah and poached egg is genuinely something my older two will make themselves now, which, if you have teenagers, you’ll understand is basically a miracle.
I’ll be honest: I used to dismiss breakfast vegetables as a café thing, not a family thing. I was wrong about that.
One plant-forward meal a week (not a whole plant-forward week)
The ‘eat less meat’ conversation can feel enormous if you approach it as an all-or-nothing shift. We haven’t gone anywhere near that. What we have done is nominate one night a week where the meal is mostly plants – not because of ideology but because it’s usually cheaper and often faster.
Wednesday is ours. It’s often a grain bowl situation: the Warm grain bowl with roasted roots and labne is a regular, or the Aromatic Spiced Rice with Quinoa with tofu, which even my sceptical youngest has come around to, mostly because I stopped announcing it as ‘the tofu one’. Small victories.
One night a week. That’s it. No grand gesture required.
Snacks as a genuine plant opportunity
Snacks are underrated as a way to get more plants in, particularly for kids. Carrot sticks with hummus, apple slices with nut butter, celery with cream cheese – these things work. They’re not exciting, but they show up consistently.
The Energy Balls recipe on this site is one I make on a Sunday afternoon and portion into the kids’ lunchboxes across the week. They’re oat and seed based, genuinely filling, and contain enough goodness that I feel good about them going in a bag at 7am. The Date and lime energy balls are another version that’s become a post-netball Saturday staple – the team has started expecting them, which means I’m committed now whether I like it or not.
Think about colour rather than servings
I’ve found that counting ‘serves of vegetables’ creates anxiety in me and exactly zero change in behaviour. What actually works is looking at a plate and asking: is there more than one colour here? It’s a blunt instrument, but it’s a useful one on a weeknight when I have about four minutes of mental bandwidth left.
Orange, green, red, white – any combination of those means something varied is happening. It doesn’t need to be perfect. Dietitians often suggest that eating a varied range of coloured vegetables and fruits helps ensure a broader spread of nutrients and plant compounds, and the Nutrition Australia guidance on eating a variety of foods supports this as a straightforward everyday principle.
A bowl of the Ultimate Green Juice is another easy way to get something extra in on mornings when breakfast is rushed. I don’t think juices replace whole food – the fibre matters, but as a supplement to an otherwise ordinary morning, they have a place.
Make it easy to choose plants first
There’s a version of this advice that costs nothing: prep your vegetables first so they’re the thing you reach for. Wash and cut them on Sunday. Keep a container of cherry tomatoes at eye level in the fridge. Put the fruit bowl on the bench where you actually see it.
We’ve all heard some version of ‘make the healthy choice the easy choice’, and I know it can sound a bit wellness-poster-ish. But small friction is real. If the carrots are washed and cut and sitting in water in a container, my kids will graze on them after school. If they’re whole and muddy in the bottom of the crisper drawer, they absolutely will not. That’s just the reality of tired children and tired adults.
For more on building these kinds of habits into real family life, the mindful eating guide on this site is worth a read – not because it’s complicated, but because it reframes the whole thing as attention rather than rules.
None of this is a radical overhaul. It’s really just a series of small adjustments that, added together, mean more plants on the table most nights. That feels like enough.
– Nicole Barnes, Golden Door Living kitchen
