Miracles Never Cease

I don't know WHAT came over me yesterday at the Farmer's Market when I loaded up my bag with artichokes and brussel sprouts. Seriously?  My usual pick ups are the berries, asian pears, other fruits, my favorite baba ganoush, potatoes, onions, green beans, cucumbers, peppers - normal stuff. (Except for the baba ganoush, but if you haven't tried it you should.) But all those fresh, organic vegetables just looked so colorful and wholesome there at the Farmer's Market.  I started to feel like the health conscious mother of a vegetable loving family just by virtue of being there.  It couldn't hurt to try, right?


I got on allrecipes.com and found the highest rated recipe for brussel sprouts.  How bad can anything be roasted in olive oil, salt and pepper? Then I got to work on the artichoke, boiling it until soft so my kids could supposedly peel off the leaves, dip them in lemon butter and scrape off the flesh with their teeth.  I'm sure someone out there reading this is saying, "Yeah?  What's the big deal?" because their kids eat this stuff all the time, but when I told my husband what I was making for dinner he looked at me like I was NUTS!  (And when I told him I needed him to be positive about it in front of the kids because they would follow his lead, he started telling me in Japanese that brussel sprouts were his LEAST favorite vegetable of all time - and my husband will eat just about anything.)


Long story short, I threw away the brussel sprouts after an initial taste test, even though my husband thought I was too harsh and ate four of the little buggers.  I guess I should have tried the kids, but really - they were BAD!


BUT . . . just look at these pictures of MY kids devouring an artichoke.  In fact, FIGHTING over it:

It really is an attractive vegetable.  I mean, look at this:

Maybe I should have tried them on the brussel sprouts after all.