buy fresh, buy local, actually choke down your brussel sprouts

I got a good lesson I didn't really need in why buying fresh and local is so important this Christmas. Several weeks ago, I offered to make the brussel sprouts for Christmas dinner, on the vague grounds that Rowan liked the way I did them and I didn't want her turned off brussel sprouts. Then the weather gods turned nasty and dumped a couple feet of snow on Victoria, and Dave's great plan to open the farm stand on Christmas Eve got similarly buried. You can't pick brussel sprouts if you can't find them, apparently. He did offer to let me wade through the fields and pick my own, but somehow I didn't find the time to do that.

So I went to Pepper's, which is otherwise a very nice little grocery store, and bought several pounds of "BC" brussel sprouts which, aside from not being attached to a stalk, looked fairly fresh and decent-like.

I cooked them up in my usual way, sauteed with bacon (grease included) and then steam-fried with apple juice. Normally this produces lovely sweet tasty brussel sprouts, but not this time - they were as godawful as I remember brussel sprouts from my childhood (sorry mum). Ugh. Blech. I couldn't believe some of them were actually eaten.

Lessons learned:

1) Do not ever buy brussel sprouts from a grocery store.
2) Rowan's love of brussel sprouts is in no way due to my amazing cooking skills. Dave gets ALL the credit, and he can probably take most of it for all the other veggies she likes.