When First I Practiced to Deceive

A confession. And a recipe.

Saw the following headline:

Italian Prime Minister Sours on Brussels.

Naturally, I thought this meant Giorgia Meloni was taking Brussels sprouts off the official state menu. But upon further review, it had something to do with the European Union, which doesn’t care what it eats.

So why should the original thought have tiptoed through the tulips of my fevered brain? Because I was once soured on Brussels sprouts myself. As a kid I didn’t know what they were. Some sort of cabbage bud. They needed something to do in Brussels in the 1200s, so the alchemists tried turning gold into greens. It worked. A new food was formed, but the alchemists went bankrupt.

Now the rest of us have to eat them. My mom cooked them in boiling water. This led to my first real act of culinary deception upon my dear ma and her scheme to get me to ingest those soggy green alien heads.

We ate dinner together back then, Mom and Dad, my two brothers, and I. That evening Mom served us some sort of red meat. No problem there. But right next to it were those steaming, stinking, leafy orbs of death.

I needed a plan.