Another November Recipe: Warm Brussel Sprout Salad

I actually made this warm salad about a week ago, but did not really have time to chronicle my attempts as the whole hustle and bustle of Thanksgiving and Black Friday temporarily took over my life. Anyway, a while ago, I had a delicious warm brussel sprout salad at Pizza Antica on Santana Row. Here is a picture of my inspiration salad:

Now I usually don't like salads all that much, but this warm salad with perfectly cooked brussel sprouts really blew my mind and inspired me to try to copy it on my own at home. I do need practice getting all the bitterness out of brussel sprouts, but for the most part it turned out pretty well. Here are some pictures and a rough idea of a recipe:

Step 1: Hard boiling eggs. I use a method that I think I learned from Ina Garten. I filled the pot with room temp/cold water enough to cover the eggs. After it comes to a boil, I turned off the stove and let it sit (covered) for 10 minutes before dousing with cold water to stop the cooking.

Step 2: Toasting walnuts. Meanwhile, I threw about 1 cup of walnuts into the toaster oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 5 minutes to toast.

Step 3: Bacon! I roughly chopped up 3 strips of bacon and threw them into a frying pan and let them crisp up. When they were crisp enough, I removed the bacon to another dish, but kept the bacon grease in the pan.

Step 4: Brussel sprouts & onions. I washed a 16 oz package of brussel sprouts and got rid of the gross outer leaves. I then deleafed layer by layer until I hit the core, which I quartered. I also cut up 1/4 of an onion into strips. I threw all these leaves, quartered cores, and onions into the bacon grease filled pan. At one point, I covered it to try to make it cook nicer, but I'm not quite sure if that helped or hurt.

Step 5: Back to the eggs. I peeled 2 of the hard boiled eggs and cut them into little slices (I believe it was sixths).

Step 6: Assembly! I dumped all the brussel sprouts and onions into a bowl and sprinkled the bacon, walnuts, and egg on top.

The resulting salad served four people nicely as a side to a meat entree. Overall, I think it went pretty well considering I'm crap at improvising or cooking without a recipe. For next time, I want to figure out how to cook brussel sprouts without bitterness and whether I should cook the onions separately since they did not caramelize as much as I wanted. I'll keep tinkering with it because I desperately love brussel sprouts when they're cooked well. 

-jennkay

Categories: bacon, brussel sprouts, cooking, eggs, inspiration, november recipe, onions, pizza antica, resolutions, salad, santana row, walnuts