Pickled Carrots

About a month ago I bought a bunch of shallots from the greenmarket to pickle. That got me brushing up on my pickle reading and I happened across the recommendation that any leftover brine you have prepared can be kept almost indefinitely. That was just enough to rekindle my interest in light pickling. Not all pickles have to steep for months (like my pickled shallots) Some can be ready to eat overnight. Lately I’ve been using light pickling to extend the life of my prepared veggies. Last week I roasted a bunch of chiogga beets and tossed them in a jar with some of the leftover brine from my shallots. I’ve been enjoying beet and goat cheese sandwiches ever since. If you're making pickles to eat relatively soon and store in the fridge, you don’t need to go through all of the labor intensive processes of sterilizing and sealing jars. Just make a quick brine (salt, sugar, vinegar in water) and pour it over a jar of veggies. Your pickles won’t be the kind that will last for months out of the refrigerator, but the acid or salty environment of the brine will help your pickles long outlive other cooked or fresh veggies in your fridge. While I was roasting my carrots, I remembered having some beautiful pickled carrots at Franny’s a few months back. I figured that it was a perfect opportunity to try my hand at something approximating them. The result was so tasty I had to post it. The pickles are pleasantly salty and tart, but those sensations yield to the delicate, sweet, earthy essence of carrot.



Yields about 1 12-14oz jar

5-6 roasted carrots, cut in half lengthwise and trimmed to the length of your jar
white wine vinegar
salt
bay leaves
strips of lemon peel


Arrange your carrots in a jar. Tuck in a few pieces of lemon peel and bay leaves. Pour white wine vinegar (or other light-flavored vinegar) into the jar until it fills about a quarter of the jar. Pour in water until it is about 3/4 full. Add a teaspoon of salt. Close the jar and shake to dissolve the salt. Adjust the seasoning of the brine to taste (remembering that the carrots are sweet and you want a fairly tart brine. (At this point you're leaving a little room left in the jar so that you can adjust the tartness and saltiness of your brine) Fill the jar up with water and store in the fridge. Your carrots will be ready to devour the next day. As this is the first time I've made these pickles, I can't say how long they'll last. I have a sneaky suspicion that my jar will be empty long before these little carrots lose their charm.

Carrot Soup

I must have had dozens of carrot soups. Perhaps it is not encouraging that I distinctly can’t remember any of them. Carrots seemed like a rather obvious choice for a penny stretching dish. Though they are readily available and uniformly cheap, they can also be mediocre and forgettable. I’ve been playing around with a couple of techniques to try to wring an exciting flavor out of this humble root vegetable. I tried cooking the carrots in a number of different ways before settling on my old standby favorite for root vegetables: roasting. Then there was the question of how to best fit these (now quite tasty) carrots into a soup.

I’ve found that my favorite soups often have at least two parts. The pesto stirred in just as you serve a pesto soup gives a brightness and bite to what would otherwise be a rather plain vegetable soup. Spice infused cream provides a subtle and sweet counterpoint to my favorite autumn chestnut soup. And who can resist the charms of sour cream, cheese and crumbled tortilla chips on a spicy black bean soup? I think that these toppings and additions are so appealing because they offer contrast. The often long cooking time of a soup can tend to give it a boiled, warm homey character; comforting but one dimensional. But add a little bit of bite and texture contrast and: voila! You have a soup worth writing about. For this recipe, I seasoned the roasted carrots two ways. A scoop of the fresh, zesty marinated carrots is served atop each bowl of rich, roasted carrot soup

Yield: 5 servings


Carrots (about 10, any variety)
2-3 garlic cloves, peeled
1 onion, peeled and quartered
1 potato, peeled and cut into large cubes
6-7 sage leaves
3-4 bay leaves
salt
pepper
brown sugar
olive oil

1/2 cup vegetable broth (substitute with water if you don’t have any)
water

Roast the carrots: Peel and cut the tops off all your carrots. Place all of your vegetables in a baking pan. Sprinkle liberally with salt, brown sugar, and pepper. Scatter a few sage and bay leaves in the tray. Drizzle with olive oil. Cover the pan with tin foil and poke a bunch of holes in it. Roast at 350 until the vegetables are cooked through, but still firm (you can test the texture of a carrot by inserting a paring knife, it should offer some resistance but still yield fairly easily to the knife). It will likely take 45 min-1 hour for the vegetables to cook.





Puree the Soup: Set aside three carrots for the relish. Place all of the other roasted vegetables in a blender with broth and two cups of water. Puree until smooth. Add water until you have the desired texture. Adjust salt to taste.

Serve: Pour soup into bowls and serve with a scoop of carrot relish.



Carrot Relish
3 roasted carrots
the juice from half of a lemon
a tablespoon chopped Italian Parsley
a quarter of a red onion, finely chopped
salt

Dice the carrot and onion. Mince the parsley. Add salt and lemon juice to taste. Let the carrots sit and marinate for about 20 minutes before serving.

Initial Thoughts

I most often decide what to eat haphazardly; there is rarely any narrative, only emotion. I feel like Sushi. Tamales. Pasta. Or, if I'm feeling lazy, just a reliably satisfying hunk of cheese. Being trained in food doesn't help limit my stream of consciousness -- actually, it throws a wrench in. I inevitably have a long mental list of recipes and ingredients that I'd like to try out, which usually doesn't help out the coherence of my meals. In The Omnivore's Dillemma, Michael Pollan eloquently describes this aimless eating as a uniquely American culinary identity crisis. Without a strong culinary tradition, the poor American cook is vulnerable to innumerable trends, hype, fear and insecurity. Preparing such meandering meals also produces a lot of waste. Because there is not a core group of ingredients, little snippits are left to languish, forgotten, and irrelevant to the dinner of the next day. Every time I clean out my fridge I find myself awash with guilt as I uncover scraps of leftover tofu, a handful of slimy spinach that I forgot about and sometimes the tragedy of an avocado half which has turned to mud.

Being financially conservative is certainly practical and relevant (and timely given the much talked about ballooning of food prices), but it is not the only reason this experiment is interesting to me. Using your ingredients well and fully is arguably the highest respect that you can bestow on them. It is a different level of intimacy with your ingredients. I am learning to gauge how much flour per week I will need to make bread, when that is my primary source of starch. Ingredients suddenly have heft. Their mass is relevant. Kitchen management feels a bit like shepherding the flow of ingredients as they pass through this strange kitchen/human beast. The various elements must be put to good use, and at the right time. Wheat enters the kitchen, then is turned into bread. The bread keeps for 4 days, then the crust must be removed from the remainder and frozen for croutons or allowed to dry for use in other dishes. Produce is the trickiest. Pears that are verging on overripening must be cooked before they go bad. A gift of garden-fresh cucumbers must be eaten within a few days, or else pickled. Kitchen management is a much more complex task than just producing a good meal. And the product of kitchen management is much more than just a tasty dish, it is a dynamic process. A tricky, interesting process.

Panzanella

About a year ago I was researching recipes from de re Coquinaria , Apicuis’s collection of recipes. There are several recipes for various bread salads. Though traditional Panzanella is clearly post-Colombian exchange (it highlights that most useful new world fruit, the tomato), it has clearly grown out of that same tradition of combining raw vegetables with stale bread and seasonings. Take my word that the description of stale bread and raw vegetables does not do this dish justice. Panzanella is both light and satisfying. I find it is the perfect dish for a hot summer evening, particularly late in the season when good tomatoes and cucumbers are abundant and cheap. In fact, I was prompted to make Panzanella after I received some lovely tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers from a friend's garden. Panzanella is usually served as a small plate, but if you add hard boiled eggs or tuna it can hold its own as the centerpiece of a meal.



(serves 2 as a main course)

2 1/2 c. diced vegetables (mix of tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers)
1/2 onion chopped finely
1/4 c. white wine
1 T wine vinegar
2 T olive oil
1 t salt
freshly ground black pepper
2 cloves of garlic
2 c. dried bread
a handful of basil leaves, snipped finely with scissors
4 hard boiled eggs



Finely mince your onions. If you are using a sweet onion, (such as vidalia) simply set it aside to mix in. If you are using a standard yellow onion (what I happened to have on hand) then you may want to let the onion sit in a little cold water for a while. This rinses off some of the chemical components that give onions their harsh edge. I cut my onions first, and let them sit while I finish chopping the other vegetables. Chop the remaining vegetables.



Mix together chopped vegetables, bread, wine, olive oil, vinegar and salt. I like to add garlic a little bit at a time as some garlic cloves are stronger than others. Serve with quartered hard boiled eggs.