Fun with Carrots

Well, what did you think this was going to be about?

Carrots, really useful and versatile vegetables, come in a variety of colours in this thrill seeking age. They always did of course but just recently plant breeders hoping for an edge have been pushing the novelty angle. You can get carrots in all colours of the rainbow, well, almost but having tried most of them I can tell you that yellow carrots are nicest raw pulled straight from the ground, white carrots are close to inedible (most seed is derived from an animal feed stock, hardy and extremely chewy to keep cows contented through the winter) and purple ones, they just taste like carrots. So we'll confine ourselves to using the orange beauties today. Orange was always my favourite colour.

The carrot salad in the picture above was one of my first exposures to weirdness in food - if I tell you that many of my formative years were spent in Norfolk it will explain some things, at least to British readers - when even the idea of making a salad with a carrot was a bit outré. Anyway, daringly they sold this on the deli counters of my youth and I loved it.

Grate some carrots, add a good handful of well salted roasted peanuts (but not dry roast, oh no, never), a much smaller handful of sultanas or raisins (don't overdo this, you'll regret it) and a good dose of lemon juice. Mix well, in an ideal world leave for a couple of hours for the flavours to mingle, and that's it.

The French of course, have their carottes rapées which I have discovered in the course of researching this piece to have inspired a number of dubious home videos. I was going to include a link to the one involving a pink rabbit, a giant carrot and a chain saw but the quality was so bad and my download speed so low I gave it up as a bad job.

Anyway to make authentic carottes rapées all you need to do is dismember your carrots, preferably with a tool like a mandoline that makes thready bits rather than grating it and douse in a mustardy vinaigrette. That's 3 parts oil (use a bland one) to 1 part vinegar (a nice cider vinegar perhaps) with some salt, pepper and a big teaspoonful (to your taste of course) of moutarde dijonnaise, all whisked well together. If you read the packets in the supermarket you'll find no end of other esoteric ingredients, but trust me, these are the essential ones. Again, best with a few hours to mature.

Finally, following the rule of three, we have a cooked carrot salad. This is a sort of North African thing with variations from Morocco to Egypt and then some.

Cut up some mature carrots into neat pieces and cook until just tender in a large pot of salted boiling water - I used about 800g which were sufficient for the following quantity of sauce. Drain the carrots reserving about 200ml of the cooking water.

Put a pan on with plenty of olive oil in it, say 4 tablespoons and allow to warm. Crush three or four cloves of garlic and let it sit in the warm oil. Add a teaspoonful of cumin seed, a teaspoonful of ground cumin, hot chilli flakes to taste (you can add a fresh chilli with the garlic if you like hot), a pinch or two of allspice, a tiny tin of tomato puree (70g) and turn up the heat a little. When it starts to cook add the reserved cooking water and stir well. Add two or three tablespoons of a good red wine vinegar and bring to a simmer for a couple of minutes. Taste and adjust seasoning with salt and pepper if necessary. Return the carrots to the pan and coat in the sauce. Add a couple of tablespoons of chopped parsley (coriander leaf is also good) and then remove to a serving container to cool to room temperature or a storage box for the fridge. Keeps for three or four days, if it lasts that long.

Not the world's greatest picture but it was in the middle of a two hour thunderstorm and even my camera thought I should be using flash...



And if after all these you still have carrots to spare, try this recipe for Pickled Carrots that I blogged last year.

"And dat's de end!"