Salads for Kids

It's a general tendency of kids to hog on junk or may be chocolates or spicy stuff. Many moms complain that their kids don't eat nutritious food or healthy food like salads. But there are ways by which you can fool around and surprise your kids as well, by cooking some interesting recipes of salads. Salads are supposed to be highly nutritious foods containing lots of minerals and vitamins which include almost all the vegetables in raw forms. It is supposed to be a high fiber food. Salads are best for any age group especially for kids, since they are in their growing phase. I agree that having uncooked salads might give you a tough time because of their weird tastes, but trying out different recipes using the same and making them slightly tastier will not do any harm to you. I am sure you will enjoy eating them and make your kids enjoy as well! Here are some interesting combination's of salads you can try out at home...

Obviously, you would always want your kids to have very healthy salads and not too oily or spicy one's. Any salads consisting of high proteins like the boiled chicken or ham or egg salads or may be fish salads (tuna); and high carbohydrate content like vegetable salads or may be bean salads or salads having boiled potatoes would be very healthy. Also you would not want much of fat content so try to avoid mayonnaise or whipping cream. Instead just add salt pepper, honey, lime. This will surely taste awesome! Pasta salads are considered to be healthy as well.

Pasta Salad
Pasta is one of the very good options of salads. You can try recipes with different types of pastas like the wagon-wheel, the shell shaped, tricolor pasta and petal shaped pasta.

• What you need to do is just cook the pasta of your choice as in boil it and then drain it.
• Add corn or black beans, vegetables like carrots, green, yellow and red bell peppers and peas or add mushrooms, add oregano or olives or broccolini, different types of lettuce leaves, add chicken pieces if you are a non vegan etc. in it.
• In another bowl, you need to mix slight lime juice or orange juice and honey. Add salt and pepper. Add a bit of canola or olive oil and chili powder. The dressing for your salad is ready! If you want to use sauces as dressings, you can add mayonnaise sauce mixed with low-fat milk or may be mustard sauce or tomato salsa as well.
• You can add grated cheese or melted cheese since kids love it.
• Now just toss everything. Your salad is ready!

There are n-number of pasta salad recipes for kids like the Mexican pasta salad, Citrusy pasta salad, Tricolor pasta salad just to name a few.

Fruit Salad
Normally, kids and in general all of us, like to eat fruits. But if you can experiment and create some amazing fruit salad recipes for kids, nothing can beat it. For these type of salads, you need to add and toss different combination's of sliced or chopped fruits like bananas, apples, pineapples, oranges, strawberries, kiwis, grapes, papayas with salt and pepper. To make it more attractive, you can add dry fruits like the raisins, almonds or nuts. They add to the nutritional value of the salad. Also, you can make use of mayonnaise sauce or whipping cream to decorate it further and also enhance the taste. You can add dried coconut as well. Make use of lettuce leaves since it's a salad. I am sure you all must have tried a fruit salad recipe at home. They are the most popular one's, may be not as salads but more of dessert salads!

Fun Salad
If you want to try some fun recipe, go ahead with this one. It's really interesting. Obviously, it is time-consuming and a bit extra effort goes in doing this one but it is worth it!

The Honey Tortilla Salad
Ingredients:

• Tortillas
• Lime juice
• Olive oil
• Honey
• Any combo of the salad items mentioned above
• Salt

Procedure:

• The only effort you need to take in this is for making tortillas. These are small cakes; consisting of potatoes or onions within. Make tortillas according to your choice. You can buy them from the nearby market as well.
• Moisten them with a cloth so that they become flexible. Keep in the microwave if wanted.
• Fit the tortillas in cup muffin pans and bake them in oven for 20 minutes at 400 ºC.
• Meanwhile, toss all the other ingredients in a bowl.
• Add them onto the tortillas which appear cup-shaped. Your fun salad recipe is ready to eat!

To sum up, I would say that try your own recipes of salads for kids. The best part about salads is that you can choose any combination of the above ingredients and in either ways it's going to be healthy!