Look at us, making healthy choices!

I've never liked vegetables a lot. Sure, I've gone through phases when I ate whole bowls of cucumbers or cauliflower for lunch (covered in salad dressing, of course), those times always pass quickly, and I'm back to cereal and sandwiches. Fruit? Ah, fruit. I love it. I could eat it all day. I could probably live on just grapes for quite a while. Berries? Kiwi? Peaches? Bring it on. All of it.

As chubby people, my husband and I have been on plenty of diets over the years, or tried to eat better in this way or that. We've tried low & no carbs, weight watchers, spiritual angles, and I've attempted to be a vegetarian more than once, but none of it has really stuck. We're able to make some sweeping cuts, such as HFCS, and partially-hydrogenated oils, and after realizing we were sensitive to gluten & dairy, we've cut 90% of those out of our diets. (Husband can't get on board with any gluten-free bread, and there isn't enough of a variety of affordable goat & sheep cheese to cut off all cow cheese.)

Enter Pinterest. Oh, I love it. If you haven't investigated it yet, please do so now, but only sign up if you want to have hours of your life sucked away in looking at recipes, outfits, crafts, and home decor and then feeling bad about not having the time, money, or stamina to do any of it. Here, you can look at my boards: http://pinterest.com/robeena/

The things is, unlike many people, I've actually done a number of things I found on Pinterest. I've made a few kid crafts and tried a number of recipes. It's the recipes that have really been a godsend in our lives. I've gotten e-mailed meal plans, I have hundreds of recipes bookmarked in my browser, cookbooks sit wasting away on my shelf, but something about the visual nature of Pinterest drives me to actually cook (or have my husband cook) what I see there. I think it comes down to a few factors: seeing a picture (unlike in most cookbooks, where the majority of the recipes don't have photos), having a real person comment on whether the recipe worked or not, be they the "pinnner" or the blogger that put up the recipe in the first place, and being able to easily visually organize recipes I'm interested in. It takes no effort at all to scan a page of pictures for what looks good to me, then buy the ingredients and get to work.

So here's the exciting thing: our absolute favorite things to eat lately are VEGETABLES! And not just any old vegetables, but roasted vegetables. Oh, man. Seriously drool-worthy. I was skeptical when I saw all the pins of things like roasted cabbage, roasted carrots, and even romaine lettuce (Seriously. Romaine lettuce.), but I'm always trying to get myself to eat more veggies, so we tried cauliflower.

OMG! This is so freaking good. We haven't tried the linked recipe from REMcooks yet, mostly out of laziness, but there's no way it could be anything but amazing. We have made roasted cauliflower at the homes of multiple friends, and they're always pleasantly surprised by it. You can put any flavor you want on it. We've made it spicy, we've put nutritional yeast on it for a cheesiness, and every time we gobble it up like candy. 

But wait! We now have an even favoriter (yep) roasted veggie: BRUSSELS SPROUTS! Om nom nom. 

We had tried brussels sprouts a few times and I decided I was done with them, because they were always meh. When I saw these balsamic roasted sprouts, though, I figured I'd give them a try, because balsamic vinegar covers over a multitude of nastiness. Truly, we love to eat these more than almost anything else. I might even choose these over pizza, were the two placed in front of me. We're going to have to keep a constant supply in the house. 

So this is an exciting development. We'll roast almost any veggie, and they are scrumptious. I doubt I'll ever be a vegetarian, because it's just not practical, what with tri-tip and fajitas to eat, but at least we are expanding our food horizons and can happily fill up on healthy stuff instead of carbs, which we hardly even make anymore.