LINCOLN SQUARE — Thank you, carrots, for pulling this year's gardening season out of the dumps.
Kudos for patiently biding your time, waiting out my intense love affair with corn and then swooping in to mend my broken heart.
Carrots were the darling of the summer of 2013, a fact I had forgotten but was soon reminded of as I spent time at my garden plot this week.
Patty Wetli says carrot scones make a "healthy" breakfast treat:
They sneak up on you, these bashful roots, conducting their business underground and out of sight, attracting little notice until their showier bed-mates have run their course.
Then, lo, they're ready to harvest and it's like Christmas morning, plunging your hand into the soil and waiting to see what surprise awaits.
I had planted four square feet of carrots, sowing "Paris Market" seeds back in May, a 19th Century French heirloom variety I chose in large part because the packet said "does well in shallow or rocky soil" and "very sweet." Sold.
Because I refused to thin my carrots, I wound up harvesting lots of micro-roots: smaller than they should have been and potentially not as flavorful. Which was totally fine because I had plans for these carrots that would render their taste irrelevant.
Glaze 'Em
The simplest way to prepare carrots, short of chopping them into crudites, is to glaze them. Boil 'em, stir in some butter and brown sugar and you're good to go.
At least that's how it works with store-bought carrots. With garden fresh, there's the added chore of scrubbing them free of accumulated soil, snapping off their heads of greens and cutting off the tips.
It took me, no joke, an hour to wash several dozen carrots, a mindless, repetitive task that frankly was wildly relaxing after a day in front of a computer. As an added bonus, I got to meet and greet each carrot individually, taking note of their infinite diversity.
While they were all different in their own way, some were more different than others — sporting a sort of dusty greenish color at their top.
I Googled "why are my carrots a weird color" and came across a helpful FAQ from Texas A&M (agriculture is literally their middle name, don't you know). FYI: This was not the wisest search term as most of the results had to do with carrots turning a person's skin yellow.
Anyhow, apparently the heavy rains we experienced over the summer washed away soil from my bed, exposing some of my carrots to the sun. Essentially, these off-color carrots were sunburned and the Aggies recommended slicing away the green part before eating.
Mystery solved.
Bake With 'Em
Given their natural sweetness, carrots are an obvious candidate for baking. The challenge was in finding a recipe that didn't have the word "cake" or "coconut" in it.
(Dave is notoriously coconut-intolerant, not in the allergic-intolerant way but in the hates-with-the-intensity-of-1,000-burning-suns way.)
In the end, I opted to modify a carrot coconut scone recipe from "Baked Explorations" (click here), substituting chopped almonds for the coconut.
Between the nuts and a whopping tablespoon of vanilla, I can't say that the pureed carrots came through with a pronounced, or even subtle, flavor.
But if anyone asks, I can legitimately say I had veggies for breakfast.
Display 'Em
If you happen to have a root cellar, by all means stockpile your carrots.
I opted for a less conventional storage option — I put them on display.
The idea occurred to me as I pulled my carrots from the soil and they came out in bunches — because, as I mentioned, I hadn't thinned them. What a pretty bouquet, I thought to myself.
Because I had more carrots than I could glaze or bake at once, I arranged the remainder in a vase, layering large to small from bottom to top. The result, in my humble opinion, was worthy of Martha Stewart, or at the very least, Blake Lively.
I have no idea how long the carrots will keep in water, but their greens began to wilt almost immediately. Feel free to snip off the stalks and add them to a salad — rumors of carrot tops' toxicity has been totally debunked.
Depending on which website you consult.
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