Cooking with Color: 5 Tips for Adding Color to Your Meals

Photo: Nick Fewings / Unsplash

Eating the rainbow is incredibly important, ensuring we enjoy meals that are beautiful and packed full of antioxidants, nutrients, and phytochemicals. But sometimes, upping fruits and veggies can mean you end up feeling a little bit too bunny-like. How do you add more color to your meals without feeling like you’re choking down rabbit food? Here are five tips to help:

Unleash Fabulous Flavors with Culinary Techniques

The best environmentally friendly cookware will help you release the most delicious flavors, textures, and aromas from your veggie-packed meals. Caramelizing veggies, for example, softens them down and brings out the natural sweetness they have locked up in their molecules. Meanwhile, sautéeing veggies is perfect for reducing bitterness and adding some mouth-watering browning around the edges. Veggies cooked properly can be enjoyed as they are or used as a rich and flavourful base for tasty soups, stews, and dips.

Expand Your Fruit and Veg Horizons

Have you ever tried dragon fruit? How about star fruit or lychees? Has rainbow chard ever brightened your dinner? Have you ever tried orange watermelon? For more vibrant daily nourishment, try new fruit and vegetables whenever they cross your path. By being adventurous and looking out for new things to try, you’ll have plenty of nutrient-packed weapons in your armory, leading to a more colorful daily diet.

Keep It Cheap

Nearly 95% of the US population doesn’t hit the daily requirements of nutrients like vitamin C and vitamin A. That can be for all kinds of reasons, but often, it comes down to cost. Luckily, there are ways to eat more color for less, including:

Consuming pickled, frozen, or tinned fruits and veggies which can be just as nutrient-dense as fresh ones (just make sure they don’t have added sugar);
Eating seasonally;
Batch-cooking bulk veggies you’ve purchased at a discount;
Growing your own produce;
Finding places that sell misshapen produce for a lower price;
Utilizing local free/low-cost fruit and vegetable cooperatives;
Learning how to stretch your veggies and fruits further by making foods like sauerkraut and all-purpose vegetable sauces.

Be a Child

Children who eat more fruit and veggies are shown by science to have better mental health. Still, many parents have children that could make a career out of dodging their greens. We don’t know what’s good for us as children, which is why our parents have to hide healthy food inside our meals. Squashed broccoli and carrots in mashed potato, finely chopped courgettes in pasta sauce – you name it, your parents probably tried it to get you to consume the goods. If you’re a true veggie and fruit dodger, now is the time to treat yourself like a child and hide the good stuff in the foods you love once again. Open up! Here comes the airplane.

Start small

You don’t have to add much fruit and veg to your diet to make a big difference. No need for cauldron-sized Buddha bowls, or smoothies in a bucket – just dip a toe in and reap the benefits. For example, did you know that just one medium banana or apple counts as a serving of fruit? Or just half a cup of lentils or carrots counts as a serving of veggies? You only need five of those servings and you’re meeting the guidelines for five a day.

Discover the exciting wonders of nature by adding all kinds of yummy fruit and veg to your meals. By trying out a variety of colorful options, you can enjoy more flavourful and nourishing meals day to day.

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