Add spinach

A painless way to eat more veggies

Lots of people would like to eat more healthfully. Unfortunately, with a standard diet, it can be pretty challenging to hit the 5-9 servings of fruits and vegetables nutrition experts recommend.

So here’s a relatively painless way to boost your tally by another serving or two: Add spinach to whatever you’re cooking.

When exposed to heat, spinach cooks down quickly to fairly unobtrusive strands. It also doesn’t have a strong taste. These days, almost every grocery store sells bags of baby spinach in the produce section.

So grab a bag each time you go to the store and see where you can fold in a few leaves.

Veggie up the menu

For instance, if it’s pasta night, you can heat up jarred sauce in a sauce pan and add in a handful of spinach leaves. By the time they cook down (in a minute or two) they’ll just look like extra herbs in the sauce.

If you’re scrambling eggs, some spinach and cheese will make the meal more colorful and tasty.

If you’re having canned soup for a work-from-home lunch, just add a few leaves as you’re microwaving it or heating it up on the stove top.

If you grilled some sort of protein on the weekend (steak, chicken), stir fry the leftovers with rice and spinach to get another meal out of your cooking.

Or just mix spinach in with anything else — fajita meat and peppers, or any jarred sauce from the international aisle like Rogan Josh. If you’re baking fish or chicken, put a few leaves under your protein and they’ll cook down in the juices.

It’s worth a shot

In any case, there are lots of habits for boosting produce consumption (like putting grapes in a bowl on your counter!) but adding spinach to cooked dishes is slightly less intuitive. So it’s worth trying if you haven’t before. Even if you don’t wind up eating all of the bagged spinach before it goes bad, you might be able to add an extra serving or two — and that’s probably a good thing.