Brussels sprouts never fail to spark a little conversation.  Seems either folks love them or hate them, but frankly, I think they unfairly get bad press due in part to bad childhood memories.  Oddly, I was never in the camp of Brussels Sprouts Haters–the first time I had them as a child, I didn’t mind them, which is really saying something because back in the 1970s, people did horrible things to Brussels sprouts–namely boiling them to death, which made them very, very bad indeed.  Still, even boiled to death, I could see in my little kid mind that these baby cabbages (as I called them) had promise. I think above anything else, I thought they looked cool and it seemed like a very grown-up thing to eat.  Growing up, they didn’t appear too often on our family’s table–my younger brothers, for one, would never touch them, but over the past few years, I’ve rediscovered them–each fall, tweaking the recipe a bit and coming up with different ways to make them.  Previous Thanksgivings, I have separated …