Brussels Sprouts & Farm Pictures

   I'm a huge vegetable lover! Even when I was little, the first dish I hit up at parties was always the relish tray. I loved snacking on raw carrots, celery, broccoli, and cauliflower! As I got older, I discovered many new vegetables that I loved and continued to expand my vegetable repertoire. Up until recently, I thought that I was some sort of a vegetable expert...UNTIL I got a farm share at a local farm and realized that I KNEW NOTHING! There are SO MANY vegetables out there that I didn't know about! I was shocked. Not only had I never heard of many of them, but I had no idea how to cook them. As a result, I have spent many hours in recent years researching and learning more than you can imagine about vegetables.

   One of the vegetables I had never tried over the years was, surprisingly, Brussels Sprouts. My mother never served in our house when I was a child so I was not familiar with them. I had no idea how they tasted or how to cook them. One day, I was doing some research on them when I stumbled upon a recipe on one of my favorite websites, Organice Your Life. Organice Your Life is a website that provides advice through articles, recipes, videos and more on how to live a healthier lifestyle. It was founded by Lonneke Engel, one of my favorite international models. Being a huge fan of fashion magazines, I've followed the work of Ms. Engel over the years and remember some of her earliest work in the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog and various Guess? advertisements. But I didn't know that she is now a certified health counselor! I was thrilled! If you are interested in healthy recipes, skin and beauty advice, or articles on overall well-being, I highly recommend adding Organice Your Life to your list of websites you check daily.

   This recipe for Brussels Sprouts was written by Antoniette Costa for Organice Your Life and can be found here http://organiceyourlife.com/brussel-sprouts. 

1. Cut the ends off of the Brussels Sprouts.
2. Coat in extra virgin olive oil in baking pan.
3. Sprinkle with sea salt and freshly ground pepper.
4. Roast in the oven at 400 degrees for 45 minutes (shake pan occasionally during cooking time to help cook evenly).

   It's so simple and so delicious! I like to cut the Brussels Sprouts in half so that they get even crunchier. We also like to pull out the crispy outer leaves as they fall off during cooking and snack on them while the inner parts finish cooking.

   In other news, I picked up our farm share on Monday and snapped a few shots of the beautiful farm. Some of our farm share this week included lettuce, baby cabbage, baby bok choy, broccoli, kohlrabi, spinach, kale, summer squash, radishes, garlic scapes, and snow peas (that I picked myself!).

You can't get snow peas fresher than this!

   It's so beautiful to eat fresh foods and make healthy choices! It can change your life! I promise!  

   For more information about Organice You Life, please visit http://organiceyourlife.com. For more information about Mountain View Farm go to http://www.mountainviewfarmcsa.com/welcome. For more information about Lonneke Engel, check out http://lonneke.com/.