5 salad ideas that kids will love

1. Have fun

Come up with something a little childish. Place the salad in a well-washed plant pot. Grate some carrot for the base, dice some avocado and tomato over it, and make a heap of soil from boiled black quinoa or dark breadcrumbs and pile on top. Plant a few small finger-food-sized vegetables into the 'soil' and give your kids forks to use as spades.

2. Use attractive colours

Children love colour. On its own, lettuce may look boring, so put all sorts of delicious foods of different colours in your kids' salads. Something red, something yellow, something green, something orange. Build the salad in a bowl with a rainbow of colours from thinly sliced cabbage or arrange delicious salad ingredients into separate areas of the bowl.

3. Chop it up small

Chop, slice, dice and cut. Half a chunk of tomato, coarsely grated carrot or whole lettuce leaves will not appeal to children. But when everything is chopped into delicate little cubes, slices and pieces, it is a different story altogether: children become interested and the salad goes down the hatch.

4. Play around with serving bowls

For a change, how about putting a salad into an empty avocado skin, lettuce leaf or small tortilla bowl? Salad can also be served in a flat taco shell, on a flatbread or inside a small melon. Sometimes it can be fun to eat out of a lunchbox instead of using a plate – with different compartments for each component of the salad and the dressing.

5.  Experiment with patterns

Vegetables can easily be cut into funny-shaped pieces. Let your imagination run wild and cut vegetables into sticks, circles, slices, matchsticks or rings, or try using small biscuit cutters to serve salad in the form of edible hearts, stars and flowers.

A melon baller can be used to cut food into fun balls, but not just of melon: try avocado, apple and boiled root vegetables, such as beetroot, potato, chioggia beetroot and pumpkin.