Does just hearing about vegetables make your kids grimace? No worries. It happens to a lot of moms. Yet vegetable soup is an important dish for their diet and it’s therefore useful to include it in their diet at least twice a week. How can we do this, though? We’ve got some tips and tricks that can be very useful to make minestrone into their favorite dish!
Which vegetables are best to make a soup for the kids?
Preparing a vegetable soup means that we can "hide" all kinds of vegetables in the mix, including the ones that our kids aren’t all that crazy about. Balancing the ingredients is important: Make a base with celery, carrot, onion, zucchini and potato and –depending on the season – you can add other vegetables like green beans, peas, broccoli, cabbage, leek, tomatoes, cauliflower, pumpkin and legumes, especially peas and beans. And let's not forget the herbs: In summer, add fresh basil leaves just picked from the balcony to the minestrone, while in winter, add parsley – even the frozen version works. The secret touch? A teaspoon of tomato paste, which sweetens and colors the soup.
Vegetables in different shapes
To ensure that even the youngest children are happy with your minestrone, cut the vegetables in an imaginative way – using stencils of various sizes to make carrot flowers, zucchini bears or even potato hearts! Some children prefer minestrone in pieces, while others – especially during the early days after weaning – prefer it blended into a cream. Try different versions to understand your kids’ tastes!
A magical pastina
Soup can serve as a complete meal if it contains legumes, vegetable proteins and grains – be it pasta, rice, spelt, barley or whatever you like. When it comes to pasta, we can choose all kinds of varieties – like fun pasta inspired by cartoon characters or alphabet. Mealtime will be more fun and the kids will finish the soup easier!
Let's cook together
Children are passionate about the activities of adults and they love to share in these daily moments. (We highly recommend to bake a pizza together!) So – how about involving them in making the soup? They can cut the vegetables (if they’re big enough) or wash them, or perhaps just put them in the pot. They will be all the more likely to eat it since they helped make it!
That extra touch
To give more flavor to the minestrone and to sweeten it for the little ones, try the Genoese version, which includes the addition of pesto (a spoonful will be enough), which not only colors the dish, but gives it extra flavor, as well. Or make it creamier and more appetizing by melting a creamy cheese – like the Crema Bel Paese Galbani – to give it a richer taste after blending the minestrone.
And what if we add croutons? Use sliced bread or a loaf of ordinary (or whole-wheat) bread and toast it in a pan with a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil and a little rosemary. The aroma and crunchiness will make the soup irresistible!