I think you should braise them, with or without cream. Some vegetables are delicious enough on their own that you can get away with steam, butter, salt and pepper – but brussels sprouts need extra help.
The problem is, they’re too cabbagy, and tend towards bitterness. The braising recipe below includes a preliminary blanching, which I think removes the nasty flavor before the enhancement of butter and/or cream. This is paraphrased from Julia Child:
Blanch the washed sprouts in a big kettle of boiling, salted water. Let them boil for 6 minutes uncovered. Rinse with cold water to stop the cooking.
Butter a casserole dish large enough to hold all the sprouts in one or two layers. Heat oven to 350. Arrange the sprouts heads up in the dish. Drizzle with melted butter; salt & pepper.
Cut a piece of waxed paper to fit the dish, and butter it. Place it butter side down on top of the sprouts. Cover the dish and heat it on the stovetop until sizzling. Then place in the oven for 20 minutes, “or until the sprouts are tender and well impregnated with butter,” as Julia has it.
You can enrich this further with boiling cream, 1/2 to 3/4 cup or so, added at the 10-minute mark. If you do this, use less melted butter.
Put yer brussels sprouts in a double boiler (or in a collander placed inside a large stock pot, with a thin layer of water on the bottom.) Steam them until bright green. Place 3-4 TB of butter (real butter, please) in a skillet and heat on medium until a nice earthy brown color. Do not burn, or you’ll be sorry. Lower heat a bit and add garlic and fresh sage. Saute until fragrant. Pour browned butter sauce over brussels sprouts and salt to taste.
Simple as can possibly be, but delicious.
And Incubus threw up at the mere sight of a brussels sprout? Huh? Were you sick or something? Was it moving? I mean, c’mon. It’s a small, round vegetable. Seriously.
My wife does something like this. Ok, It’s only sort of like this. We dispense with the steaming and go straight to the skillet with a bit of olive oil, and once they are cooking, a bit of dry vermouth.
But the big trick is to chop them up using a food processor with a slicing blade before you add them to the pan. So the sprouts are sort of like what you see in cole slaw, rather than a thick dense ball o’cabbage. If you want, mix them up with rice after cooking.
And yeah, I guess you could just slice them up for a Belgian Cole Slaw. Why not?
I think I was unclear. You don’t saute the sprouts. You steam them, and make a separate browned butter/sage sauce to pour over them. You certainly could saute the sprouts (and it sounds delicious) but not in this recipe.