Meal of the Week: Green Sprouts – Dalaran Style (Winterveil/New Year Special!)

When Colin told me that the second thing we’d be making for his traditional New Year’s meal was sprouts, I was… hesitant.

Sprouts are actually in the same family as cabbage, which is why they look and taste like itty bitty cabbages (See Mrs Bendon? I do listen!). I’ve had them before in Darkshore when I was staying with the Bendons but they uh… They weren’t great. They kinda tasted like mushy little balls of fart. Gilnean cooking involves a LOT of boiling and no offense to the Bendons and their incredibly generous hospitality, but not everything does well being boiled.

Colin said that the green represents bank notes which are apparently a big thing in Dalaran. And I guess Gadgetzan, cuz Pryn uses them to. They’re like gold but lighter? Anyhow, and the carmelized onion represents gold. So it’s to bring good fortune to the new year. And the bacon represents… deliciousness. I guess. Always having enough to eat? Yeah let’s go with that.

Either way, these are WAY tastier than fart-sprouts and just as easy to do!

The cast of characters! We have about four thick strips of bacon, one pound (half a kilo) of green sprouts, and an onion, of which we’ll be using half. Simple, right?

First! Get everything chopped. Chop the bacon, chop the greens, chop the onions.

Trim the sprouts up. You wanna cut off any leftover parts of the stem and anything that looks discolored. Colin said that when he was working in the Purple Parlor, he would remove the discolored leafs. However he did say that most of the discoloration is just from ‘oxidization’ so I guess if your sprouts are a little oxidy that’s okay? I don’t know what cult Oxidy comes from, maybe the Ox one in Pandaria? I dunno and I didn’t think to get clarification.

Anyhow, cut all of them in half and clean them up as best you like/have patience for. Then move the chopped bacon to a hot pan and fry it up.

Let all that delicious fat render out and the bacon get all crispy. Once it’s done, move the bacon out to drain on something absorbent and toss in two pats of butter, if you so desire.

This is optional, but I found that the sprouts actually end up sucking up a lot of this flavor. I need a new pan, this one is kinda warped… Problems for another time.

Throw in the sprouts and onion and completely crowd the pan like an idiot. I probably should have used a bigger pan, but my biggest pan was being used for tomorrow’s recipe. This still worked out just fine, it’s just not best practice.

Now the most important part of this is to leave it alone. Make sure it’s not burning, but you want to get the sides toasty and get a good I dunno.. crust thing on them? You want them to be goldeny. I think this is called caramelizing but I’m not sure, so let’s just call it ‘deliciousizing’.

The trick to deliciousizing is to leave it alone. Stir it enough to keep it from scorching or to get all the sizes, but you want it to have contact with the oil and heat in order to do its thing and it won’t do that thing if you’re keeping it constantly moving. If you like stirring nonstop, see tomorrow’s recipe.

See that delicious brown bits on it? That’s where the good, non-fart flavor comes from. Let it go a little bit longer than this, then mix the bacon back in and move into a serving dish. This one turned out to be surprisingly popular for something so easy.