A few weeks ago I made a vinaigrette with lemon juice instead of vinegar and some maple syrup as a sweetener, and I immediately fell in love with the combination.

Apparently, I am not the only one: Just a week later, I found myself at Back Forty – a terrific joint – eating brussels sprouts with lemon and maple syrup.

“Hey!,” I said to myself, you can do this. So I did.

Lemons, where have you been all my life? I can’t believe it has taken me this long to realize how terrific fresh citrus is. I’ve used fresh lemon or lime juice in plenty of recipes, but that vinaigrette just blew me away. I won’t try to quantify the magic of citrus, just take me at my word and try to use more of it.

I believe that the brussels sprouts at Back Forty were oven-roasted, but I decided to do mine on the stove top for no reason in particular. I was pleased with the result, but I’d like to try it in the oven at some point as well for comparison’s sake. The trick here is to caramelize the sprouts as much as possible without burning them

Brussels Sprouts with Lemon and Maple Syrup

Trim any excess stem from the brussels sprouts, halve them and remove any loose or brown leaves.

Steam them until they are fork tender. You basically want them to be done cooking at this point. This could take anywhere from five to ten minutes depending on the size of the sprouts and how you are steaming them. If you’ve got a steamer, great. If not, just put the sprouts in a covered sauce pan with about an inch of water and keep an eye on them to be sure all the water doesn’t boil off. Drain them when they’re done.

Over medium-high heat, coat a skillet (cast iron is great if you’ve got it) in a thin layer of olive oil or butter. Add sprouts, shake them to spread them out, and then leave them the hell alone. You want them to get a nice brown crust, and this won’t happen if you are constantly stirring or shaking. Give them a minute or two and then check on how the caramelizing is going.

Once the sprouts are brown, add in lemon juice and maple syrup. The ratio here is up to you, but I’d recommend 1 tablespoon of maple syrup and the juice of half a lemon for each pound. Now you can toss and stir to your heart’s delight, until the sauce thickens and becomes more of a glaze.

Serve. Eat. Enjoy.

For me, while living in Brooklyn, that meant that I bought all my produce at the Park Slope Food Co-Op, so almost all of it was local and/or organic, but — deep dark secrets revealed — when I ate meat, usually I bought it at the much cheaper and much more convenient C-Town, just down the street from my apartment. Okay, I admitted it, and no gods of free-range chickens smote me with lightning.

Now that I am in Minneapolis, however, I find that the reverse is true. Organic/local vegetables here are astronomically priced, while it is actually quite possible to find free-range everything for incredibly decent prices. Go figure. And so, I have watched as my balance of grocery money and shopping time shifts to pursue non-confinement meat/eggs/dairy, while I worry slightly less about the provenance of my produce.

No, this is still not an absolute ideal, but it is important to eat sustainably in all senses of the word — not just that the food you are consuming is sustainable itself, but that it is sustainable for you. That means: You’re not going broke buying it, you’re not driving way out of your way to get it, you’re not killing yourself figuring out how to cook it. That means that you will keep eating that way, not give it up because you went whole-hog (sorry, I couldn’t help myself) too early. Or cold turkey. Or some other food pun.

While my philosophy is basically do what you can, if you can stop eating confinement meat, then that is what you should do. Factory farmed meat is basically the root of all evil in America. Okay, maybe I go too far, but some evils are certainly attributable to factory farming: pollution, corn surplus, health issues, myriad social injustices for the workers. There’s also the enormous issue of the inherent rights of the animals, but I will let Jonathan Safran Foer speak to that.

Unlike Safran Foer, I am not willing to go vegetarian, nor do I think such a stand is really necessary with the great meat producers that exist, if you only seek them out. As reasonably priced as it is, however, I can’t really afford to buy sustainable meat as the main portion of every meal, nor, honestly, am I really inclined to. I like having some days where I eat no meat, or where I eat meat only as a small part of a dish — not out of any ethical stands, but simply out of my tastes and health.  And so, I have resolved to eat less meat, but better meat, because that is the stand that I’m both ethically and financially comfortable with.

It’s still not a black-and-white issue for me. What am I going to do when I’m out at a restaurant? At someone’s house? Well, probably I’m going to eat some factory-farmed meat. What should you do if you can’t afford or find non-confinement meat? Don’t eat meat one day a week (maybe Monday, because then you have an alliterative reminder). If you are a poor and overworked twentysomething, you probably already do eat a meatless meal every week, if not several. Feel good about that!

So here is a meal I call meat-optional. I was, in fact, the culprit who even added meat in the first place, because I had just started my non-confinement kick and was excited about it and saw some really beautiful free-roaming boneless pork chops tempting me from the butcher case. Here again, though, the meat is more of a seasoning — there is less of it than of either the tofu or the Brussels sprouts — and you could certainly do away with it completely.

Brussels Sprouts with Caramelized Tofu (and Pork)

Adapted from 101 Cookbooks

Serves 4

Ingredients

-       1 lb. Brussels sprouts, rinsed and cut into 1/8-inch wide ribbons

-       1 lb. extra-firm tofu, patted dry with a paper towel and cut into 1-inch segments

-       5 cloves of garlic, minced

-       ½ c. pecans, chopped (I used TJ’s Sweet and Spicy pecans, which were awesome in this; if you use regular ones, toast them first to bring out the flavor)

-       6 Tbsp. brown sugar

-       salt

-       Optional: 1 boneless pork chop, cut into 1-inch segments

-       Optional: some brown rice to go with

1. Heat a splash of vegetable oil in one skillet. Add tofu and sauté until golden, flipping occasionally, about 5 minutes.
2. Meanwhile, if making pork: Heat a splash of vegetable oil in another skillet. Add pork and sauté until cooked through (also flipping occasionally), about 5 minutes. Add pork to pan with tofu.
3. Add garlic to tofu/pork. Stir in sugar. Season with salt. Cook a few more minutes, until everything is covered with caramel. Remove from heat.
4. Meanwhile, in a second skillet (either the pork one or a new one, or you can wait til the tofu is done and use that one, but I hate waiting that long), add some oil. When oil is hot, add shaved Brussels sprouts. Season with salt. Cook until some sprouts are browned and all are cooked through (they will be bright green). Remove from heat.
5. Serve tofu/pork on a bed of Brussels sprouts (over rice?), with a sprinkling of pecans on top.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people decide to teetotal during the month of January. Seems it’s a kind of cleansing; a kind of New Year’s resolution; or maybe it’s just the kind of crowd I tend to hang out with. Well, I am not abstaining from alcohol for the month, but I did give myself an almost equally difficult challenge: stop buying so much bacon.

There was no time limit set on this goal, nor any real teetotaling (I’ll still eat bacon, I just want to stop buying so much of it). I realized, though, that if I buy a package of bacon on a Saturday, I feel the need to put it in everything – both because I want to use it up in good time and because it makes everything taste better. Which means that I end up eating a ½ lb. of bacon a week. Which can’t really be good.

So, soon my recipes may be more bacon-free, but for right now, I’ve still got a backlog of bacon-infused dishes, and this one, I think, is the real winner of the bunch: three ingredients (plus salt), practically no time, and vegetables involved (and Brussels sprouts, to boot). I really really love this dish; I would eat it all the time if I could. I would really like to try Kevin’s bacon-free version of making Brussels sprouts, though (he also has a more thorough musing on why the amazing Brussels sprout is so maligned, mostly having to do with rampant overcooking).

Basically: Don’t overcook. Caramelize, caramelize, caramelize. And add bacon to everything, until the day you realize you just can’t eat anymore.

Caramelized Brussels Sprouts with Bacon and Pecans

Ingredients

-    Brussels sprouts (I used about two big handfuls), ends trimmed, rinsed, outer leaves removed if wilty
-    Good-quality, thick-cut bacon (I used about two slices), roughly chopped
-    Pecans, chopped (I used about ½ cup)
-    Salt

1.    Bring a medium pot of slightly salted water to boil. Blanch Brussels sprouts (dump them in the boiling water for a minute or two until a little tender and then drain them). Preferably, you’ll shock them in a bowl of ice water to stop the cooking after you blanch them; if you are lazy, at least run some cold water over them (remember, you don’t want them to get mushy, though the sautéing will undo a little of the mushiness). When cool enough to handle, slice the Brussels sprouts in half lengthwise.
2.    Fry the bacon in a large skillet. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on plates lined with paper towel. If there is a lot of fat still in the pan, pour some of it off into a can or jar.
3.    Add Brussels sprouts halves to the bacon fat. Cook until golden brown and caramelized (about 10 minutes?).
4.    Meanwhile, toast the pecans in a toaster oven or oven (watch carefully). (You can also toast them in the pan before adding the bacon.) They should slightly deepen in color and become very fragrant.
5.    Add the bacon and the pecans to the Brussels sprouts. Toss the whole thing, so it is well-mixed and everything gets a little fat coating. Add salt to taste.

Few things make a dish sound fancier than the addition of some kind of sauce.

With the exception those for pasta, sauces are generally considered the domain of restaurant chefs with their balsamic reductions, sherry creams, and bechamels. But there are plenty of easy sauces, and they are a great option when you are trying to do a “nicer” dinner. They just make a dish seem more impressive.

Which sounds better:

Green beans or green beans in miso-soy dressing?
Pork chops or pork chops with garlic-wine reduction?
Brussels sprouts or Brussels sprouts with mustard glaze?

Avec sauce pour moi, s’il vous plait!

And most sauces aren’t especially difficult. They’re just an extra step requiring a few additional minutes and ingredients, often less. To get started, try these Brussels sprouts with mustard glaze, which take almost no extra time to prepare, require one extra ingredient, and seem so much classier than their unadorned cousins.

Oh, the Brussels sprout. How did you become our most despised vegetable? It could be that they grow like this:

Weird, right? But I doubt that most people have ever actually seen a Brussels sprout plant, so I have three alternate theories:

First, I think that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. What kid is going to have an open mind about sprouts when they are represented in popular entertainment as the paragon of grossness? I think I’d serve them to kids under a code name like “tasty spheres” or “midget cabbage.” OK, maybe not those, but you get my point. No kid is going to want to eat a vegetable that regularly induces retching in beloved TV characters, and the tastes we form as kids tend to follow us into adulthood.

Second, they’re often served unseasoned and boiled to death, which is a real shame, because well-treated Brussels sprouts are one of my favorite vegetable of all time. Cooked with a little fat and allowed to brown and caramelize, Brussels sprouts are candy-sweet and highly addictive.

Finally, as we age, the extremes of our taste buds tend to mellow. Brussels sprouts do have an edge of bitterness to them. Many kids tend not to like strongly-flavored foods because they’re just not very adventurous eaters, but these foods also taste more strongly-flavored to younger palates. Plus the bitterness in sprouts is exaggerated by many common cooking methods. So, if you’re saying to yourself, “I wasn’t tricked by marketing, I just hate the taste,” I urge you to try them again. I have a standing challenge to sproutaphobes to try mine and still claim not to like them, and while I’ve only had about three takers, I’m batting a thousand.

The trick is to stay away from solely water-based cooking methods and make sure to brown and caramelize the sprouts to bring out their sweetness. Roasting is great for this, but I sautéed these sprouts, which would have been delicious even without the not-actually-very-fancy fancifying sauce.

Brussels Sprouts with Mustard Glaze

1 pound Brussels Sprouts
4-8 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons dijon mustard
Salt and pepper

1. Cut the sprouts in half and remove any sickly-looking outer leaves. Slice off any excess stem.

2. Steam or boil the sprouts for 3-5 minutes depending on size. I know, I know. I just said no water-based cooking methods, but starting the sprouts this way is fine and a good idea if you’re going to saute them. Pre-cooking them a little bit makes it a lot easier to cook them all the way through without burning the outside.

3. Melt about 2/3 of the butter in a large saute pan over medium heat, add the sprouts, and cook, shaking the pan frequently, until the sprouts begin to brown.

4. Combine mustard and remaining butter in a bowl and microwave for about a minute until butter is melted and mustard is runny. Whisk with a fork just to combine. You can, of course, do this in a pan, but it’s pretty easy to cook the moisture off and end up with a burnt and sticky mess, so just be careful.

5. Add sauce to pan and toss to coat.

6. Serve, with or without airs of pretension.