Do you struggle with finding more ways to serve vegetables or provide grain-free lunches? If so, you are not alone.

Each week, dozens of parents e-mail me, struggling with ways to make veggies more fun. To help you, I’ve brought in my friend, Ali, from Inspiralized. The recipe is great for dinner or as a healthy school lunch. For more ideas like this, visit our grain-free meal plan. 

—From Ali:

Do you constantly struggle with preparing meals for your kids that you don’t feel guilty eating? Trying to stay fit but can’t resist chicken fingers, buttered pasta, and mac n’ cheese? Are you having trouble finding the time to cook healthy meals for your family?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then I have the solution for you: speggies! Speggies are “spiralized vegetables.”

What does spiralized mean? Spiralizing is using the kitchen countertop tool called the “spiralizer” to turn vegetables into noodles.

Once you have spiralized a vegetable into “speggies,” the options are endless: soups, pastas, noodles, and even sandwich buns and pancakes!

By replacing regular pasta and noodles with speggies, you are not only sneaking extra vegetables into your child’s diet, but you’re creating meals that are low-carb, low-fat, and low-calorie to help us grownups keep our figures.

Spiralizing a vegetable takes less than 30 seconds! No more waiting for the water to boil, and no more mushy noodles. The best part about this new method of cooking is that you can make speggies with your kids, because they love the magical experience of taking a vegetable and turning it into noodles!

If you need step-by-step picture tutorials on how to spiralize, click here. 

To help you get started in putting your speggies into a recipe your kids will love for dinner or lunch, I’ve paired two kid favorite flavors: pizza and spaghetti.

This simple recipe  can be enjoyed by a family and then used as a leftovers lunch the next day—talk about time-saving! Who doesn’t love pepperoni pizza and spaghetti?

Related: Top 5 Lunchboxes We’ve Tested

Pepperoni Pizza Zucchini Spaghetti

• Author: MOMables.com
• Prep Time: 5 mins
• Cook Time: 2 mins
• Total Time: 7 mins
• Yield: 2 1x

Scale 1x2x3x

Ingredients

• 1 medium zucchini, peeled and spiralized, using blade C
• 10 thin slices pepperoni
• ½ cup chunky-cut pieces mozzarella
• 2 slices chunky whole-grain bread
• ½ cup marinara sauce

Instructions

1. Place the zucchini noodles, pepperoni, mozzarella, and bread into lunch box compartments.
2. Heat up the marinara sauce in a saucepan or microwave.
3. Pour the marinara sauce over the zucchini pasta and serve.

Notes

Let your child create his/her own pizza, using the toppings in the lunch box compartments.

—
Alissandra Maffucci is an enthusiastic home cook and the blogger at Inspiralized. Inspiralized offers a creative new twist on healthy eating, using a spiralizer to create noodles out of vegetables. The blog features daily recipes and inspirational content dedicated to this culinary concept. Ali has a penchant for yummy food and hopes to inspire everyone to spiralize and start eating clean, healthily and creatively. She currently resides in Jersey City, NJ.