Friday Night Dinner Blog

The Menu:

Stir-fry of roasted purple carrots, fennel, broccoli, radicchio* 

Homemade pain de sarrasin with olive tapenade, raw pesto and mushroom-walnut spread. 

The Story:

When a person has been in your life for years, it can sometimes feel as if you’ve heard everything about them at least once.  But that is when you find out that though they hate walnuts, they do like them in brownies, or that their favourite subject in school wasn’t history, it was chemistry, or that they once dreamt of becoming a carpenter. Because when do we ever really know everything about a person?  And the trick, I realize, is to keep asking rather than start assuming. In that way, every relationship can remain new in little tiny details, keep surprising you, stay fun instead of going stale and becoming same-old-same-old.

And so it is with the trusty carrot. 

I thought I knew carrots.  Who doesn’t? They’re sweet enough to be satisfying when you’re not sure what you want but are staying away from sugar, and yet they have that satisfying crunch and enough liquid to be thirst quenching. 

Carrots.  Who hasn’t had them in a hundred different ways?

As children, cooked carrots were a nightmare for many – the overly sweet mush that tasted of little and promised a lot through parental insistence that they were good for us. Then came carrot juice, which can turn your fingers orange and is touted as one of the healthiest foods one can consume.   Carrots with peanut butter, then carrots with almond butter, shredded carrots in Asian-flavoured salads with raisins and cabbage, carrot and apple, carrots on the bottom of the roasting pan on Sundays, carrot cake, muffins, warming carrot soup with ginger on a cold winter night.

I didn’t think there were any ways in which I hadn’t tried the ubiquitous carrot.

Until I encountered it in purple. 

Like so many other vegetables, the classic orange carrot is actually a domesticated mutation of a wild species that has been bred by humans for its increased sweetness.  But carrots need not be orange.  In fact, the orange carrot is probably the newest of the bunch.  Historically, they come in a variety of colours including yellow, white, purple and even black, each with its own little twist. 

And so, while the more mundane orange carrot is too sweet for me when cooked, the purple kind offers a nuttier, deeper flavour that isn’t as sugary. 

The whole day had been busy and full of unexpected surprises.  How wonderful to sit down to a Friday Night Dinner tasting of the hours that have come before, and what a treat to be able to discover something new without having to leave the comfort of my kitchen. 

The Recipe:

Combining leftovers is a wonderful way to create something completely new.  Earlier in the week, I had taught a cooking class in which we had slow-roasted the purple carrots and fennel.  The steamed broccoli was from a meal the day before, and the radicchio needed to be eaten.  Combined, the vegetables created a dish that was nutty, crunchy and sweet, a wonderful accompaniment to a simple meal and a touching parallel with the homey ambiance around the table.

* Stir-Fried Purple Carrots with Roasted Fennel and Radicchio

Ingredients:

Leftover slow-roasted purple carrots (see recipe below)

Leftover slow-roasted fennel

Leftover steamed broccoli

½ head radicchio, chopped

1 T olive oil

½ T tamari soy sauce

splash mirin

salt to taste

toasted sunflower seeds (optional)

For the slow-roasted purple carrots:

Preheat the oven to 150 degrees Centigrade (302 Fahrenheit)

Chop the desired amount of carrots in half length-wise and then into quarters length-wise again.

For 5 carrots: Put in the roasting pan and cover with 1 -2 T balsamic vinegar and a pinch of coarse salt (I use sel de Guerande)

Mix with your hands to make sure they are all well-coated

Roast for about 1.5 hours, checking every half hour or so and giving the pan a little shake. Flip the carrots about halfway through.

Optional addition: a splash of hazelnut oil will really bring out the nuttiness of the carrots

For the Stir-Fry:

The goal is to warm up the leftovers without making them too soggy, and to cook the radicchio only ever so slightly. 

Drizzle the olive oil at the bottom of a pan.  Add the radicchio and stir.  Then combine with the rest of the vegetables in the pan.  Mix well before adding the tamari and the mirin.

Cook on a relatively high heat for just a few minutes and serve hot. 

Nutrition:

Let’s talk about broccoli.  

Just kidding – carrots. 

We all know that carrots are good for the eyes, right?  An old folk saying states that people who eat a lot of them can see in the dark.  While this last little tidbit is not true, the reason carrots are touted as fantastic for us is the anti-oxidant beta-carotene.  Beta-carotene is what gives carrots their orange colour.  It is metabolized as Vitamin A in the body and can help strengthen the immune system and protect against a myriad of diseases including cancer, heart disease and stroke.  In addition, carrots are high in fibre, Vitamin C, K and B6.  Funnily, carrots have a very different effect on blood sugar when they are cooked -- they become more sugary.  

A note about carrot juice: many people swear by carrot juice, and while I agree that it has wonderful properties, I do want to point out that anything juiced is no longer a whole food.  When carrots are consumed in their entirety, their relatively high sugar content is tempered by the fibre that is present in the vegetable itself.  Once it has been juiced, however, that buffer is removed. In other words, people who are sensitive to sugar should be careful about consuming carrot juice and consider chomping on a raw carrot instead.