Broccoli is an amazing superfood. With over 200% of your daily needed vitamin C, it's an amazing staple to any diet, even if you aren't vegan. With broccoli readily available, fresh or frozen, it's easy to have it as part of every dinner! While steaming broccoli makes it soft and delicious, doing it often can get the family turning their nose up at it. Here's a helpful recipe to change up how to cook up this tasty vegetable!

The lemon in this dish helps balance out the rich flavour of the broccoli. Adding a bit of acidity to anything that has a strong flavour is always a good tip! With anything from vegetables to sauces, spritzing a little lemon juice on top of something adds a little zest and a little kick, giving it more than one note and making the dish a little less bland.

What You'll Need:

• 2-3 Heads of broccoli
• 1/2 Lemon
• 1 Tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil
• Salt to taste

Preparation:

• Preheat the oven to 420° 
• Using a sharp knife, slice up the broccoli length-wise, keeping the pieces long and thin. Since roasting them will shrink them, be sure to not cut your pieces too small!
• Quarter your lemon, removing seeds as needed.
• Place your broccoli on a baking dish in one flat layer, making sure no pieces overlap. Drizzle with the olive oil, sprinkling evenly with salt. Squeeze the quartered lemon over the broccoli. 
• Let roast in the oven for 15-20 minutes, depending on how soft you'd like your broccoli.

This is a great side dish to go along with any meal, and the recipe is fool-proof and almost effortless! It's easy as pie to throw it in before starting on your main dish, and can even be done with frozen, pre-cut broccoli. Just make sure to let it roast a little longer. 

With the crisp texture and rich flavour of this side dish, you can show even non-vegans that healthy and cruelty-free eating can be exciting and rewarding.

Photo courtesy of Jules