I’m beginning to notice a trend in the dates I’ve been going on lately:

Shortly after drinks have arrived and an appetizer has been ordered, my companion gazes into my eyes and then confesses that his mother was a terrible cook. Maybe she overcooked food to the extent that it was unrecognizable. Maybe she boiled the color and flavor out of every vegetable to grace her kitchen counter. Perhaps her idea of seasoning was to smother everything with Lipton onion soup mix. Whatever the individual shortcomings of these hapless home cooks, there seems to be one culinary failure that they all share: the cooking of the Brussels sprout. The end result of this infraction being that my potential Mr. Right (or Right Now, as the case may be) passionately hates Brussels sprouts.

While I appreciate a man enlightened enough to trace his adult tendencies back to childhood, I won’t stand for the bashing of the innocent Brussels sprout. So often is the case that this lowly vegetable is boiled beyond oblivion and then smothered with butter (or worse, margarine), and placed before a young and impressionable palate. If you, too have been scarred by a badly-cooked Brussels sprout, clearly you are not alone, but I think it’s time to quit the complaining and start cooking these beautiful babies the way they are meant to be served.

Splitting and roasting the sprouts is the key to cutting their bitterness, while the classic combination of garlic, lemon, olive oil salt and pepper makes them so much more than a side dish. These are healthy, easy to make, quick to make and, like all of my BrokeAss creations, cheap.

Let’s break the Brussels sprouts-bashing cycle, folks.