Difficulty Level: Easy

Have you ever spent years thinking you don't like some particular food, only to accidentally have a bite of it and discover you actually love it? So often we form our food opinions as children and never revisit things when we are older. I'm not talking about things that you truly don't like. I'm talking about things you think you don't like that you probably have avoided for years. When I had my big dinner party earlier this year, I served lamb. One of my guests hadn't had it since boarding school some forty years before when it had been overcooked, tough and grey. She was truly surprised at how much she enjoyed the lamb I served and she even had a second helping.

Sometimes it is simply the way a vegetable was prepared and presented to us. My husband and I grew up in the 1960's when canned vegetables were a staple of home cooked meals. He breaks out in a cold sweat if he even thinks about the combination of peas and carrots. I avoided asparagus for years because I remembered the mushy canned stuff that my mother occasionally foisted on us. Maybe the person who cooked your meals boiled the life out of the vegetables, or maybe, like my brother, you simply wouldn't eat anything that wasn't meat or potato.

We know that children model their eating patterns after their parents. If you don't eat vegetables, neither will your children. The world is filled with delicious vegetables and endless ways to prepare them so there's no excuse not to give some of them a try. Set yourself a little challenge and make a recipe using a vegetable you normally wouldn't eat. My husband never liked Brussels sprouts because he had only had them boiled until they were mostly mush. Years ago I cooked them in a pan with butter and he and both of our children loved them. Yesterday we were wandering through a local farmers' market and he spied these little organic sprouts and insisted on buying them despite my burgeoning vegetable crisper. Maybe you'll be lucky enough to be converted by this recipe too.

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