Olive Angel Hair with Seared Brussels Sprouts

Monday, November 18

Olive Angel Hair with Seared Brussels Sprouts

Rating: 4.25

This is the pasta dish I’d planned to make on Sunday, but since Seth had come down with a cold, and the weather was horrible, we made soup instead. This recipe comes from Isa Does It and is, predictably, delicious. I had some sprouts in the fridge that I’d bought for something else which kept getting postponed when our plans changed, so they were at a point that they really needed to be used, but were a little past the point where they would be good roasted as a side dish (their original purpose). I figured if I could find a recipe that had enough other stuff going on, they would be fine, and this one fit the bill. As with most recipes in Isa Does It, you probably have everything you need to make it already on hand, with the likely exception of the sprouts, and it comes together in no time flat. Isa gives some excellent advice about time management in the kitchen and this recipe is perfect for multi-tasking - sauté the onion while the pasta boils, steam the sprouts while the walnuts toast, that sort of thing. The flavors of the olives, nuts and sprouts work amazingly well together and this turns out to be one of those dishes that seems like it should have taken a lot longer to make. Ours came out just a little dry, and I should have added the extra broth the recipe advises, but it looked ok in the pan and it wasn’t until it was plated and we were eating that I really noticed it. Still, it was really, really good and we will definitely make this one again, which is staying something because I almost never use recipes for pasta – I generally just mix up a bunch of veggies with tomato sauce or pesto and call it dinner. We had a side salad with it, which we normally do. I had some of the Caesar dressing (also from Isa Does It) in the fridge so we used that. Man that stuff is good. Nice cozy dinner on a Monday night.