We were driving when we passed a farm stand with a sign that hollered, Pies! Pies! Pies! $10. The car slowed in that barely perceptible way it does when someone’s foot gets ideas. Mr. P made an interested noise. “Maybe we should—”
“We’re not paying ten dollars for a pie when I can make a better one at home,” I cut in. Because when a man wants pie, he wants pie. It doesn’t matter if it’s farmstand pie, grocery store pie, gas station pie. And frankly, I don’t love the idea of my man eating some other woman’s pie.
So I promised: I’d make pie that night.
Back home, I surveyed the pantry. Enough butter for crust—check. But filling options were… grim: a few aging Granny Smiths, bananas on the cusp of fruit-fly season, potatoes, green beans, an eggplant, and some wilting romaine. Oh, and two pounds of brussels sprouts.
I stared at the brussels sprouts. Since writing about them last year, my blog had drawn a suspicious number of hits from people Googling “brussels sprouts sexy” (unclear why). And I’d seen them creeping onto swank menus—Sel de la Terre, for one. Surely the internet could produce many recipes for Brussels Sprouts Pie.
It could not. I found one. Singular. It called for a box of sprouts, 2½ cups of skim milk, and half a cup of sugar. Sugar. In brussels sprouts pie. A war crime.
I felt the reckless tug of experimentation. I omitted the sugar, used whole milk, sautéed the sprouts with garlic and onion until they stopped smelling like feet and started smelling like food. Chopped, poured, baked.
The resulting pie—pictured below—was as delicious as it looks.
(Which is to say: your mileage may vary. Yumminess, like love, is in the eye of the desperate.)
