Sprout, Sprout, Let It All Out

A few years ago, I went to this tasting dinner that a fancyish hotel put on to try to woo people from fancyish organizations to have their fancyish events there. Note: I am not in the habit of organizing fancyish events, but I have friends who are, and some of them seem to find me a good plus one for things like this.

I scanned the menu, and once I’d got over my amusement at the way they’d butchered my last name (“Geigen,” which has exactly one letter right), I developed a feeling of dismay: every course but two involved either something I didn’t eat (bleu cheese, scallops) or something I couldn’t (beets).

Realizing that my reputation as a good plus one for things like this would be destroyed and all opportunities for subsequent invitations lost if I let my pickiness win out, I screwed my courage to the sticking place, and decided to eat everything that was put in front of me, so long as it wouldn’t kill me.

And the scallop was magnificent. And the blue cheese was glaaaaaaaaarrrrrgh so incredible. And the beets, fortunately, were paired with my favorite wine of the evening, so I enjoyed that and the goat cheese foam they’d inevitably been served with, and hoped that no one noticed the plate of odd little beet turrets that got sent back to the kitchen untouched.

Because of that experience, I made a deal with myself: for the next twelve months, I would try anything that was put in front of me (so long as it wouldn’t kill me or give me syphilis). And I did. And in that year, I discovered some things that I loved (hello foie, you beautiful, beautiful bastard), and some that I will never get on board with (sweetbreads. I just can’t.), and some – like the aforementioned scallops and bleu cheese – that became part of my regular rotation.

One of the things in that final category is Brussels sprouts. I faced down the little green monsters at Thanksgiving, a short few months after the dinner. As we passed things around the table, the Brussels sprouts reached me and I made a face. “You must try them,” a stern voice in my head reminded me. “But they’re disgusting,” a much younger voice countered.

The stern voice won – she always does, that bitch – and I tried the sprouts, and I LOVED them. And what’s more, I realized that despite my earlier, emphatic, life-long loathing of the little beasts…

…I’d never actually tried them before. I’d spent my whole life saying, knowing, certain that I hated Brussels sprouts, and that they were awful and evil and bleeechhhhhh. But I’d never even tasted the damn things. I’d just heard that they were awful for so often and from so many sources that I accepted it as common knowledge.

My father said they were awful. Every kid on every TV show from Leave it to Beaver onward, and every movie that had a dinner scene said they were awful. The children’s books I read from the ‘50s suggested ways to get around eating them. I’m pretty sure the Bayeux Tapestry is actually the story of William the Bastard and his men running away to England to stop their mothers from making them finish their sprouts.

Roger de Beaumont says “There’d better not be any fucking Brussels sprouts in this dish, kid, or it’s your head.”

But as it turns out, they’re amazing. I’ve actually yet to discover a form in which I don’t like them.

My preferred method for dealing with them at home involves cleaning and halving them, marinating them in some olive oil, garlic, sea salt and pepper (and sometimes a bit of balsamic vinegar or Sriracha sauce, depending on my mood), and then roasting the hell out of them so that the outsides are all crispy and salty, almost like a French fry, and the insides are all sweet and melt-in-your-mouth caramelized.

So when I saw that My Father’s Daughter had a recipe called “Caramelized Brussels Sprouts,” I was pretty excited, and sure it would be one of the things I tried.

It took me until this weekend to give them a shot, though, because every time I read the recipe, it seemed a bit more labor intensive than my usual “toss and roast” method. I should emphasize that it’s not; in fact, it actually takes less time in the end, but the number of steps makes it seem that way.

You start out by cleaning and trimming your sprouts, and then you steam them for seven minutes, or until they’re tender. Remove them from the steamer and chop them in half.

By this point, my apartment was stinking a bit of Brussels sprouts, and I remembered that last winter when I’d tried to convince a friend of their merits, he’d told me he’d hated the smell of his mother boiling them, and could never get past that. Having only roasted them at home before, this was really my first experience with sprout-stench, and I could see where he was coming from.

I pressed on, though, because really there wasn’t much left to do (and also, I hadn’t bought anything else for dinner). I heated some olive oil in a pan, and then put the sprouts in – cut side down – and let them sear away for five minutes. And then I flipped them – and this is the part I really objected to, the painstaking process of flipping a pound’s worth of cut Brussels sprouts one at a time – and gave them three minutes on their other side to finish out the cooking process.

And then I tossed them with a bit of salt, and drizzled a bit of oil and the juice of half a lemon over them, and scooped myself out a portion.

They were good. They had the melty, soft caramelization I like, and the lemon, salt, and olive oil combination was a great dressing to compliment their natural flavors.

Here’s the thing, though: I ate half when I made them on Saturday, and have yet to go back and eat the other half. And I really don’t think I’m going to.

There are two reasons for this. The first is, weirdly, I keep tasting the smell. Does that even make sense? What I mean, I guess, is that when I try to remember the way they tasted, the feeling I get in my mouth is not the memory of the final product’s taste, but the memory of the way the smell of them cooking tasted. And so even though I know the sprouts themselves were really enjoyable, I think about eating them and I wince.

So maybe this is a better recipe for people with less acute senses of smell, or ones who don’t live in small apartments where any smell from the kitchen permeates every corner of your environment.

And the other factor is…I just like my way so much better. Sorry, Gwyneth. I need the crispy outside and the creamy inside. You’ve only got half the package working here.