Try This Dumb Hack For Eating TWICE The Amount Of Vegetables Every Single Day
by Audie Metcalf
We are all supposed to eat a MINIMUM of 3 cups of vegetables every. single. day. for maximum, glowing health.
And while we try to use the “half your plate should be vegetables” rule of eating, sometimes it feels like our full time job is just finding new, not-gross ways of shoveling green things into our gullets.
So, as we like to do, we hacked it.
If you don’t want to endlessly scroll like every godforsaken recipe on the internet when you’re just like I DONT NEED YOUR LIFESTORY I JUST NEED TO KNOW WHAT TEMPERATURE TO COOK CHICKEN AT, here’s the basic idea:
Chop up a pile of veg, throw it in a pan, sauté briefly, and pour in 2 eggs. That’s it.
Ok so, there’s more though. The specifics matter. I just didn’t want to annoy you by gatekeeping that info until you scrolled to the bottom of this page. And for the record, recipe creators do that for ads and if you don’t scroll by those ads they don’t “make” a “living” and so that totally free recipe they created for you wouldn’t benefit them in any way, so now you can scroll and be less mad knowing you’re supporting some sweet lady in Ohio who’s just living her dream thinking up recipes.
Moving on.
But first, another disclaimer! I’m going to answer your questions about how you hate chopping, how you don’t have time in the morning for all this nonsense, and your entire family won’t eat any of this so you’re not about to make yourself a separate breakfast.
But first some pretty pictures.
Here’s my cutting board using the veg I had on hand today, which are baby bella mushrooms, broccoli rabe, garlic, and cherry tomatoes.
Yes, I chopped them up today in real time because I work from home and blessedly have no one around me when I eat my breakfast/brunch. Which is an immense luxury I realize.
And here’s the final result. I threw on some flaky salt and goat cheese and even though it’s not really a beautiful dish, it is, as Mary Berry says, quite scrummy. And yes I’m having it with some sauerkraut like some “wellness” monster but I will often have it with toasted sourdough slathered with butter. Kerrygold grass fed, but still.
To be clear, I think most people aren’t confused about how to actively eat vegetables. I think most people just don’t have TIME to spend their lives chopping and meal prepping and it feels utterly overwhelming.
So I have a few hacks for this, too. Many of them I do myself when there are kids around me, or on the weekends, or in the mornings before work (when I used to go into an office):
HACKS (hate that word but it’s efficient):
Whenever possible, buy enormous bags of fresh veg. I do this at Costco, and if they start getting wilty, I FREEZE them in a couple of big bags and then use it for smoothies (brilliant way to make them even frostier) or throw it in a pan.
If bags of fresh veg always spoil in your fridge before you can finish them all, find frozen/chopped versions of veg you love, thaw them, and keep them ready to go in Tupperware after you’ve squeezed the water out of them. A few veg that are super quick for this: spinach, peppers, onions, zucchini, corn, asparagus. Pro tip: Frozen veg have as much nutritional value as fresh. In some cases, MORE!
Use garlic paste (Amazon has my fave but most grocery stores have it, too) and squeeze into your pan with zero chopping required.
Or, if you can spend 2 mins twice a month buying pre-peeled garlic from Costco (or Whole Foods if you don’t need a torso-sized bag), blitz it all up in the cuisinart and store in a bag whenever you need fresh garlic. It’s a game changer.
I know we said meal prep is a nightmare earlier but my theory is that most of that is because we don’t know what hell all of that zucchini is even FOR. But if you chop all of this up on a Sunday (throw it all in a ziploc bag or a big Tupperware) knowing it’s to throw in a pan with eggs, it feels fun. Because you have a concrete plan. And plans are fun.
foot for scale
I don’t have a lot of kitchen tools, but the ones I have I use every, single day. And they are THIS knife, THIS huge cutting board, THIS pan, and THIS petite cuisinart.
If you have truly 2 minutes in the morning and can’t be bothered with ANY of this, I’ve often made muffin tin versions of these egg bites so that they’re just in the fridge waiting to grab as you’re speeding out the door. Will your kids actually eat them? Unclear. Possibly if you drown them with enough cheese.
FOR PARENTS ONLY, PLEASE SKIP THIS BULLET IF YOU’RE NOT A PARENT BECAUSE IT WILL GIVE YOU IMMENSE ANXIETY: If you were to make this egg-veg concoction for your whole family, would they actually eat it? Truthfully, no. They won’t. Unless you’ve started your kids on that system where you give them tiny bites of real food since they were 6 months old and so now they eat anything you place in front of them. My solution for this when eating a big breakfast together is making this scrambled dish for the growns, and egg in a hole for the kids. It’s the lowest key version of making two breakfasts, and both plates shouid be served with bountiful fruit so that they’re eating some shred of freshness. IF you load the eggs with cheese they might try it.
But truthfully we aren’t a mommy blog and there’s roughly 89,573 sites to solve such problems. I’m trying to solve YOUR issue of trying to eat more veg without feeling overwhelmed and/or sad.
That was a lot of words for basically saying “throw some vegetables into your scrambled eggs,” but I’m verbose. Sorry.
Will you try it?
Audie Metcalf is the Editor-in-chief of The Candidly, and lives in LA with her family. You can find more of her articles here.
At The Candidly, we try a lot of stuff so you don’t have to. We only recommend things we truly love, and that we think you’ll love, too. All products are chosen independently by our creative team, and all details reflect the price and availability of products at the time of publication. If you buy something we link to, The Candidly may earn a commission.
We have to eat.
