The Smoking Kitchen

The Greatest Carrots in the History of All Known Carrotdom

So my first substantive blog post is about carrots. I don’t even like carrots.

I made a cannellini bean dish last week that required 1/4 cup worth of diced carrots. I went to a different Whole Foods than I normally do, the Gold Coast location. Here’s the charming little market below. Obviously I didn’t take the picture because the day I went, the sun was hidden behind a thick swath of cloudy Chicago “springtime” misery. Looks like a nice store, though, right?

Don’t let the name “Gold Coast” fool you: This store sucked. Cramped, small selection, and dirty; as a yuppie, I was offended. The only carrots this wolf in sheep’s clothing had were two pound bags, so I had plenty left over after making the beans.

Normally I don’t have a problem with wasting food, particularly if I get to toss it at the children who attend the school across the street from my apartment. I’m not cold-hearted, by the way. That hobby is less about my stance towards children and more an attempt to bring back the days when people dumped trash out their window. I live on the top floor of a three story walk-up.

However, Taster Number One loves carrots, and she loves having me cook for her on Sundays, so I decided to put the veggies to use as food. We picked a carrot recipe from my Jamie Oliver cookbook (Cook with Jamie) that I could make using ingredients I had around the house (garlic, thyme, red wine vinegar, and olive oil). Oliver calls the dish The Best Whole-Baked Carrots, so expectations were elevated. The recipe is essentially just throwing everything together and tossing it into the oven for a while. Simple, huh?

Taster Number One’s job when I cook is to open wine, pour wine, and to help me out when I get too stressed, either by doing various prep and cooking duties or by taking my wine glass and putting whiskey in it. Tonight her task was scrubbing the carrots. Oliver recommends trying this instead of peeling, because the skin “keeps you regular.” Who knew? Perhaps that’s why rabbits always look so tense, ready to bound away at any moment, presumably to find an unspoken-for place in the shrubs and some reading material.

“Crap, where did I put The New Yorker?”

Speaking of which, the carrots in the cookbook photograph look different than the ones I purchased. Oliver’s look like carrots a cartoon bunny would eat. Mine look like weapons. Actually, in honor of the recent passing of Charlton Heston - who I think all of us, regardless of political views, can agree was one of the oldest gun rights advocates - I shall call them weapons. Want my carrots, Government? Come pry them out of my cold, dead hands.

Anyhow, Taster Number One and I had a minor dispute because she cut the carrots up. Look at what she did!

She said she cut them in half lengthwise because of their size, and that cutting them this way would allow them to cook in a time closer to what Oliver intended. I pointed out that he made NO mention of cutting the carrots and might well have avoided doing so for good reason. The unbroken carrot skin probably traps the delicious carrot flavor, allowing the dish to attain a robust carrotness while baking. In these carrots’ final moments, my love’s wanton dissection cruelly robbed these innocent vegetables of all they had lived for.

Now that I’m writing this, I suppose I can see one of these opinions was grounded in reality, and the other was perhaps associated more with speculation, or maybe stupidity. I bring this up now to publicly apologize, to show the humility often required in a relationship. The carrots - those poor, gigantic bastards - were undercooked, and it was I, inadequately anticipating the required baking time, who doomed them to the cruel abyss between crunchy and tender.

Here’s a picture of the final result, minus what I’d already put on our plates, because I’m not used to the whole website thing and forgot to take a picture of them all together in the dish:

They don’t look too bad, right? The taste was underwhelming, though. The biggest failing was that they were undercooked. Besides having an unsatisfying texture, I imagine they also lacked some of the mythic caramelization that I keep hearing about. If there is a next time, I’ll use different carrots or adjust the cooking time accordingly, or maybe allow Taster Number One to cut them up even more.

The second problem was that the delicious goop I tossed the carrots in dripped to the bottom. And it’s a shame because the goop was delicious. The best tasting carrot I ate was one I grabbed from the bottom of the dish as I was cleaning up. I need to figure out how to reverse the effects of gravity. Cooking is hard.

LESSON LEARNED, OR WHATEVER: COOKING IS NOT ARITHMETIC.

I learned tonight that not all carrots are the same. Not all ovens are the same, too. There are lots of other factors in cooking that vary. I need to be Zen, sit back and observe the big picture, blah blah blah. I need to be flexible, though that’s not my strong suit.

Related to this, I’d like to point out that Taster Number One bears the burden of carrying the sum total of common sense in our relationship. This isn’t anything new to me, nor is it, perhaps frustratingly, new to her either. Point is, in the future I should allow her to hold sway over a picture in a cookbook.

Here’s the final plate. Those beans are really amazing, maybe I’ll write about them someday. They’re just cannellini beans, rosemary, garlic, and oil. O.K., there - I just wrote about them. The brown item on the plate is a steak, which was a little chewy.

So, the carrots were a little disappointing though they have potential. There is one great thing about them, which I’ll be glad to tell you about, but first: Have you seen my New Yorker?