Carrot surprise
Deprivation continues to be an impetus for, if not always innovation, at least bravery.
I don't like carrots, and never have. But my free food bag on Monday had not just two carrots, but two GIANT carrots that dared me to throw them away uneaten. Tossing a baby carrot is like squishing an ant with a paper towel. Tossing one of these would be like squishing a tarantula with a paper towel. There's just too much connection. The only way out was through.
I already knew I was going to cook them to death, but in which way? I already did stir-fried-ish carrots earlier this week (with carrots from last week), and I wanted even less... carrot. Eventually I got to just boiling them to death. But not totally joylessly; I bloomed some cumin and garlic in butter in the pot first and sauted the carrots for a little while in that. Then I covered it over with water and started working on my salad.
I had all this kind of old leftover lettuce.
I didn't know how to chop iceberg lettuce when I first got this (for free), so I was just peeling off leaves. Eventually I wanted to know what real people did, so I googled it and found out that people actually chop this into small pieces. So I did likewise and it became far more palatable. As for how to dress it, I owe it to the same culinarily-inclined friend as before for the idea of a vinaigrette, an emulsion (I learned) of vinegar and oil. I didn't have oil, but I did have butter, and the internet confirmed that browned-butter vinaigrette is a real thing. As it indeed became on my countertop.
Someone can tell me if it needs to be more "emulsified". It seemed breddy gud to me.
And I had an apple, so I chopped that up and threw it on as well.
It's Friday, meatless day, and so the perfect day to use my Aldi sardines. The last sardines I used were so small and graceful, about six little fish; Aldi's were the same weight but only two massive sardines that went BUH in the pan as I threw them in to heat them up. They were way, way too big to sprinkle whole on top of the salad like I imagined, so I awkwardly chopped them up. The smaller ones in olive oil are definitely better than these bigger ones in brine, but these were cheap, and still sardines.
Meanwhile, I was waiting for my carrots to magically become porridge. Carrot porridge is a thing but you need a blender to really get it smooth. I was hoping they would cook down so much that they would just disintegrate and become a smooth soup, but that didn't happen. After what seems like a lot of waiting, though, they did get pretty good and soft, and I could kind of mash them against the sides of the pan, at least a little. As it came together, I started worrying more about a whole pan of almost nothing but CARROTS. Sometimes you cook and cook and cook something and imagine that when you bite into it, it's going to have that wonderful catch that you look forward to the whole time, but I suppose at this point, even, I've learned that just being a nice person doesn't mean that plain carrots will taste umami. You have to actually do something. So besides the leftover rice that I threw in to fatten it up (which worked wonderfully), I poured some soy sauce in, ground some more pepper over it, and took a teeny bite. Ooh! What was that? Was that the "catch", that feeling I didn't think I had earned? I was so enthused I ran to the cabinet and grabbed the fish sauce and poured that in too, along with more soy sauce and more pepper. And then some more butter. And some chili powder! And boy oh boy did that start tasting really good. I finally poured some milk into in, which I had been planning the whole time, and wow, it turned into this deliciously fat-tasting CARROT (!!!!) soup/stew that was exciting to eat! I have never been more pleasantly surprised. Carrots! The whole thing is just carrots! Plus seasoning (and milk...). But it was like I had cooked it beef stock with a bay leaf (I would have loved a bay leaf) and poured pan drippings in it. It even looked kind of attractive with the little pepper sprinkle in the middle.
The whole ensemble:
It was all delicious. The salad wasn't very fresh but it was flavorful all the way through. And I ate it all fairly competently with chopsticks. I can't believe today's success!