Warm Salad With Brussels Sprouts and Curly Kale

For decades now, my Mum has been subscribing to a ladies' weekly magazine. And for as long as she has been doing that, I've loved to do the crossword section. But since I met Lundulph and got interested in cooking again, I've also become quite partial to the food section too and as it happens, both of these are in the middle of the magazine, so that they can be torn out and saved. My Mum save these for me and whenever we visit Sweden, we bring back batches of these.

This year, I asked my Dad to scan some of the recipes, rather than dragging home a bundle of paper and I think this is the way forward, because I'm a lot more likely to try some of these out, like this warm salad with Brussels sprouts. It really jumped out at me because Lundulph always complains about Brussels sprouts. He does eat them once per year for Christmas dinner. He says it's like taking a regular sized cabbage and shrinking it to the size of a walnut, so the flavour is too intense for him. I disagree, regular cabbage tastes quite differently to Brussels sprouts and to date, I've not come across any member of the cabbage family that I don't like.

I made this salad to go with green masala chicken and steamed potatoes.

Ingredients
Serves 4

250 g Brussels sprouts, trimmed and washed
250 g curly kale, thick stalk removed and washed
1 dl walnuts
2 - 3 tbsp butter
1 large clove of garlic
2 tbsp honey
salt ½ dl dried cranberries

Method

1. Quarter the Brussels sprouts and shred the curly kale coarsely. Peel the garlic and roughly chop the walnuts.
2. Heat up the butter in a deep pan, then press in the garlic and sauté the Brussels sprouts for 5 - 6 minutes until the go soft.
3. Add the curly kale, salt and honey and stir through. Fry for a few more minutes to soften the curly kale a little.
4. Add the walnuts and cranberries, stir in to mix and remove from the heat. Serve immediately, before the kale goes soggy.

When I read the recipe, it seemed really good. When I was making it, I started having doubts, but it turned out rather nice. I had set honey and I ended up cooking everything longer than I should have and the kale went a bit soggy and limp. I think the runny honey can't be replaced here, as it needs to spread evenly across the salad and the set honey just stayed in a big lump. But there is a trick - heat up the set honey in the microwave to make it more fluid.

Lundulph thought it had too much butter in it, so I might do 50-50 butter and oil next time, though I thought it was nice. Possibly I might reduce the amount of honey a bit, as the cranberries turned out to be sweetened as well and it was perhaps a bit on the sweet side overall. Lundulph wasn't too keen on the walnuts either. I didn't mind, but I might swap for pine kernels, they tend to be a bit more savoury in flavour.

So overall, I was quite pleased with this salad.