I carrot get over it…

Sep 8, 2021 | Food & Thoughts | 0 comments

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Some of you may remember how a few years ago, I started a blog called “52 Weeks of Vegetables–and Other Horror Stories from a Preferred Carnivore.” In a whole year, I posted 8 times, so not really a well populated blog, but it did the trick for me. It helped hold me accountable to an absolutely wild concept – the idea of eating at least one single vegetable each week. Until then, I abhorred veggies. An absolutely passionate dislike with vehemence that I really couldn’t articulate; just felt all the way in my marrow. So I made a new year’s resolution to eat at least one veggie a week, and blogging about it was a bit of extra fun and accountability.

Although I only posted 8 times, I actually did eat at least one veggie a week… and I have roughly kept that up, at a minimum, in the years since. It was a year of veggies that changed my life forever.  

But one veggie (among others) has consistently remained in the same status of “dislike” – carrots. Raw, and the taste and texture bother me. Cooked, and the taste or texture may still bother me. Too sweet, too carroty, too mushy, too crunchy, too something and my body asks me why I hate it so. Even when I read as an image-conscious teenager that just eating carrots was a great way to lose weight (nothing was said about also turning orange), I couldn’t stand the things–especially raw.

But now here I am, 3 years of veggies later and in another country, and I ordered a box of vegetables fresh from a farm outside Phnom Penh. Guess what came in this week’s share? That’s right: carrots. Three absolutely MASSIVE carrots.   

Now, I hate wasting food, but this was a problem. Not only did I need to find a way to eat the carrots, I also needed to find a way to prepare them. My kitchen in Phnom Penh is a bit different than I’m used to from the past few years: I have two electric burners, but no oven – and no crock pots, either. I did go ahead and purchase a tiny toaster oven, a rice cooker, and my very first air fryer…

It occurred to me that roasting some vegetables made all the difference between not likeing them before and enjoying them now, so maybe, just maybe, carrots could be tasty if I put them in the air fryer… But how to prepare them? I decided to go with a savoury flavour profile, and do you know what? Last night I ate two giant carrots for dinner and I LOVED THEM!!!

carrot
If you want to try your hand at the tasty treats they turned out to be, here’s what I did…
cooking carrots
  1. Prep: I no longer have one of those super-convenient peelers, so after washing the carrots, I skinned two of them with a knife, then sliced them long-ways and halved them into long chunks.
  2. Flavour: To give them that savoury profile, I tossed them with sweet paprika, olive oil, and garlic salt before dumping them into the airfyer basket
  3. Cook: I cooked them at around 190C for 30 min, interrupting their little suntanning session a few times to shake them up in the basket and get some rotation going
  4. Finalize: When they started looking a bit crispy on the outside, I dumped them back into the original seasoning bowl I’d used and added parmesan cheese to them, tossing them more while the cheese melted on.
  5. Try: Then, I tasted them – and just, wow. I wasn’t even hesitant at that point, because they actually smelled deliciously tempting by then!

They were SO GOOD. I almost went back and did the 3rd carrot but I’m holding it out for later. I only got three carrots, after all! How did I not know for my whole life that carrots actually *could* be delicious??

Around 3/4 of the way into demolishing the bowl, I had the idea that it would be nice to add a little liquid somewhere. I thought balsamic vinegar would draw out too much of that original carroty flavour I detest; GF soy sauce wouldn’t be ideal with the paprika, but GF Worcestershire sauce could be perfect – and friend, it was. 10/10 recommend.

It may seem like a very small thing, but an entire lifetime of despising carrots has been demolished; a kingdom of hate toppled last night. Sometimes the big wins are in the smallest and most surprising of things, like determinedly finding a way to avoid food waste AND enjoy consuming the food itself.  And after last night, I’ll be willingly buying carrots again in the future and hoping they show up again in my next farm share box. And meanwhile, I now debate preparing the one remaining carrot exactly the same, trying a variation on the theme, or tossing it into some fried rice. Only time will tell…