Roast Young Carrots

I am eating a roast carrot straight from the oven.  This carrot is causing the eater in me to have an existential crisis.  Part of me wants to tell you that this tender root—no longer than a pencil and no wider than a dime—is sending brown sugary steam tiptoeing up my nose.  Its crunch just vanished, my teeth glide through without the slightest resistance.  Sweet-cream butter and sea salt glaze my tongue. Why, yes!  A roasted carrot.

Another part of me wants to tell you that beta-carotene, which the body sometimes converts to Vitamin A, is more accessible in cooked carrots than raw ones.  It is also better absorbed with fat: hence, the butter.  I want to tell you that babies need Vitamin A to ensure proper development of bones and the reproductive system.

In In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan argues that nutritionism, the idea that “[f]oods are essentially the sum of their nutrient parts,” has wrongly overtaken the American eating experience, supplanting the traditional conception in which “gathering and preparing food [is] an occupation at the very heart of daily life.”  Eating a variety of seasonal and local foods—real food, that is—will satisfy our dietary needs, Pollan asserts.  Rather than studying labels and nutrient tables, our food energy is best spent chatting with a farmer at the market, devising a meal from the instant bounty, and cooking and eating together.  When food is pleasure, nourishment follows naturally.

But I am torn.  While I wholly subscribed to Pollan’s perspective before Elinor, she has made me rethink my position as a recovering nutritionist.  I created another being!  And, as I breastfeed her, I continue to partake directly in her growth.  Relying on solely whatever food appealed to me at the market each week might have been all she needed during pregnancy and might be all she needs now.  But the American in me wonders: Am I being just a bit negligent if I don’t at least target certain nutrient-necessary foods?  Certainly I would have blasphemed modern American medicine if I did not take my prenatal vitamin (actually, I didn’t take it my first trimester because it intensified my already unbearable nausea).  Now, even, while I consume platefuls of vegetables and fruit, I plan meals mindful of her need for many key nutritional elements, like omega-threes and lauric acid.

Babies are different, I conclude.  Elinor is yet unfinished, a house still under construction—having the proper materials matters.  I just need be maintained. So, I, and, consequently, she still eat primarily with an eye for what is fresh and sounds good.  Perhaps it’s my risk-averse side or the lingering nutritionist in me, but I cannot, at least for now, ignore those nutrients believed to be key to her development.  I hope this integrated approach accounts for essential nutrients, known and still undiscovered as important for babies.  Hopefully, doing so will still preserve my romance with food, of going to the market and impulsively buying a bundle of young bushy-topped carrots and roasting them.

Roast Young Carrots
Inspired by Star Route Farms’ mounds of purple, yellow, and orange carrots at the market

Be sure to buy very fresh young carrots and cook them soon after purchase.  Otherwise, your babies may be bitter and reminiscent of dirt clods (I can attest to this because I roasted half of the carrots I bought later in the week to this result.).  Faint earthiness in carrot is lusty; actual earth is not.

2 pounds of young carrots*
1 tablespoon unsalted butter*
Unrefined sea salt

* Signifies a lactogenic (breastmilk-supply enhancing) food

P R E P . Preheat the oven to 400F.  Clean two pounds of young carrots.  Remove all but 1” of the tops. Pat dry.  (There is no need to remove the skin from young carrots; it holds much of the flavor so early on.)  Melt the butter.  Toss the carrots in the butter and a couple pinches of sea salt.

C O O K .Arrange the carrots on a rimmed baking sheet.  Shake the pan 10 to 15 minutes through cooking to rotate the carrots.  They are done when a sharp knife slides in and out without any resistance (the same test works to determine doneness for all root vegetables).  Mine took about 25 minutes to cook.

E A T  A N D  D R I N K . Nibble on them throughout the day.  I love a snack I can eat with only a couple of fingers; flatware seems unduly burdensome when I have a squirmy worm in my other arm.  Look for a honeyed white wine, something round (smooth) with bright minerality (think of mineral water, wet stones, chalk, slate).

R E F I G U R E . These carrots are like cats: they have at least nines lives in any given week.  I roast several pounds of them—carrots, not cats—on Sunday.

• To make a simple carrot soup, cook a diced onion in some butter over medium-high heat; once glassy, add a pound or two of the roast carrots, cut in dice-size pieces, and cooks for a couple of minutes; add a couple of cups of water or vegetable or chicken (or carrot, if you’re fancy) stock and bring to a simmer (another option here is to blend a pound of raw carrots and tops, an onion, a couple of cloves of garlic, and stock or water until smooth and add that here in place of the stock addition alone; having the raw carrot puree and roasted carrots creates more intense carrot flavor); simmer for 20 minutes or so; use a food mill, immersion blender or similar apparatus to blend until the soup is chunky; serve with crème fraîche and dill, chives, or tarragon.  (Calcium is more easily absorbed from fermented dairy products, like crème fraîche.)

• Here’s a carrot salad with Moroccan underpinnings that is perfect for lunch or as side for dinner: Slice the roast carrots on the diagonal in 1” pieces.  Make a dressing of olive oil and lemon juice in a 3-to-1 ratio; add a pinch of ground coriander and cumin; add ten or so grates of fresh ginger; add minced mint; whisk the dressing together and toss the carrots in it.

• Quintessential spring carrots: Slice the carrots on the diagonal in 1” pieces.  Thin a dollop of crème fraîche with water or lemon juice; mix in minced dill and a bit of salt to the crème fraîche; toss the carrots in the dressing.

• For a real treat, try Richard Olney’s carrot gratin in Simple French Food.  Decadent and pillowy, the urbane side of carrots.  Perfect for a spring brunch.  Enter glass of Prosecco.

L I T T L E  E A T S . Mash the carrots with some breastmilk (add ground cinnamon and/or nutmeg) or stock (add some minced delicate herb, like tarragon, dill, or chervil).  Or, for a simpler version of the gratin, mash the carrots with some egg yolk, extra-virgin olive oil, breastmilk, a splash of water, and a pinch of unrefined sea salt; cook on low heat, ideally in a cast-iron skillet, as you would scrambled eggs.

Text and photo copyright–Blue Egg Kitchen–2010