Well, I had dinner the other night at Michael’s Genuine Food and Drink, a fabulous restaurant in Miami’s Design District–the Design District is the place I send people when they ask where they should eat in Miami. It’s a funky neighborhood filled with fabulous design shops I cannot afford and beautiful people. Dressed from those fabulous shops.

I digress.

We were in the capable hands of Chef Michael Schwartz himself (he also hosted the farm-to-table Dinner in Paradise), and we let him recommend what to choose for the meal. I’ll blog the whole meal shortly, but for now, I have to wax rhapsodic about the roasted Brussels sprouts. Frankly, I have not jumped on the sprout bandwagon these past few years. I know I was supposed to be rediscovering this lowly veg, but …well, I wasn’t sold.

And then these came out. Oven roasted with pancetta for tenderness and sweetness. The bitterness faded to barely a bite. Smoky from the roasting…yum. I thought: I’ve found my new favorite vegetable.

So tonight, getting home late, I decided I had to have roasted Brussels sprouts. I trimmed them, popped them into a 400 degree oven with some chopped bacon and walked away…for nearly an hour. (Actually, I forgot about them. I started checking email, writing a blog post…you know how you get lost online.)…I pulled them from the oven and they were perfect: perfectly seasoned, perfectly soft, perfectly sweet…Bacon goes a long way here, and maybe I was zealous (Chef Schwartz said not to be shy with the bacon…I took him at his word)…but really..these are gooo-00d.

The whole meal was about simple goodness–and for all I know, Schwartz gives his a touch of vinegar or a squeeze of lemon…I’ll work on the flourishes some other time. For now, I got me a new favorite veggie. Roasted Brussels sprouts.