Pan Seared Brussels Sprouts with Lemon Zest

Hey, I'm Louisa Shafia, here on eHow.com and today I'm showing you how to make pan seared Brussels sprouts with lemon zest. This is what my Brussels sprouts look like before I start cooking with them. All I did was I cut off the end, peeled off the outer leaves and cut them in half. If you want to see details of how to prep Brussels sprouts, check out my video here on eHow.com. So once I have my Brussels sprouts trimmed, I put them in boiling water for 30 seconds to a minute, no more than that. Then I take them out and I put them in ice water. This is called blanching, putting the Brussels sprouts into the ice water means that they stop cooking immediately. So they still have a lot of crunch and a lot of color and this is what they look like when they come out of the ice water. So they look really attractive, nice color. This always makes something a lot more appetizing if it has a beautiful bright color. So I just let them sit on a paper towel to take out the excess moisture and these are ready to pan sear. So I'm going to heat up my pan a little bit over here. Now if you don't want to blanch and then start cooking, you can do the blanching the day before. Do them the day before, put them in the fridge, let them sit overnight and then right before you're about to serve, do the pan sear. This is a great trick if you're cooking at holidays and you have a whole lot of different side dishes to cook you can do this ahead of time. Okay so my pan is hot, I'm just going to add a little bit of olive oil and all I'm going to do here is put in my Brussels sprouts and just let them sit and brown. So I'm just shaking them to spread them out in the pan but that's it. These guys are going to sit here, undisturbed, so that they really brown. So I'm going to let them go for about five minutes. So meanwhile, the other thing that's going into my Brussels sprouts is some lemon zest. I already zested a whole bunch and um, this smells really wonderful. This lemon zest is going to give my Brussels sprouts a real brightness and kind of balance that natural Earthiness of the vegetable. So this is a microplane zester. This is what I used to zest the lemon. This is a wonderful kitchen tool to have. What I like to do is just put my zester down on my cutting board and then rotate the lemon as I zest, super easy but these are actually really sharp so you want to watch your fingers as you're doing this. So I've got plenty of zest, it's up to you how much you want to use. You can do one lemon, you can do four lemons. The other thing that I'm going to put in here is some minced garlic and I really add this toward the end after the Brussels sprouts are mostly cooked because if you add garlic too early on in the cooking it will burn. So if you're a garlic lover, add a whole lot of garlic, if you just want to go easy and you just want a little bit of flavor, all you need is a pinch. So let's see how these are doing. So these are cooking really beautifully. This is the golden brown color that I'm looking for. I'm ready to turn them over and the second side might cook even a little bit quicker than the first. So I'm just doing a pan sear on these because really these got cooked all the way through when I blanched them before. So now that these are almost done cooking I'm going to add a little bit of my minced garlic, I'm not going to add all of it, just a little bit and I'm going to add some of this beautiful lemon zest. This really doesn't need to cook for very long. This is just kind of accenting the flavors here. So all I want to do is heat that little bit of minced garlic all the way through, heat the lemon zest. Um, the aroma of the lemon zest is really coming through. It's really activated by the heat, smells great. Okay, a little bit of salt and this is ready, Um. Okay, so you can see you still have a really nice bright color and that bright color means that the vegetable still has all its nutrients in it so this is a really healthy way to cook Brussels sprouts. They're not overcooked, they're just right. It's still got a little bit of texture and I am just going to finish these off with a little bit of lemon juice and a dash of black pepper and these look wonderful. Um, oh they smell great. I advise you to try serving these Brussels sprouts to any Brussels sprouts doubters. Everyone will love these, these are delicious. I'm Louisa Shafia. I'll see you next time here on eHow.com.