Cooking Carrots

I like eating carrots, as they're a good staple vegetable: sweet and tasty, colourful, filling and versatile. It's a shame that Moonface can't grow them on her allotment as the soil is too clayey.

But carrots' flavour can be really affected by the method of cooking. For many, many years I boiled them as most people do, with just a little water. Then, we discovered that microwaving kept the flavour better, but tended to result in the carrots losing moisture and become a little wrinkled and leathery. It's a faster method of cooking than boiling, for small quantities.

Recently, we taken to using a combination method which seems to be as fast as a microwave, with all of the flavour, but without a risk of them drying out and getting tough and wrinkled. So, we heat a little oil in a saucepan and heat the carrots by frying for a couple of minutes or so. Then, as the oil turns orange from the leached vitamins, add just a splash of boiling water and put a lid tightly over the pan so that the carrots steam for 3-5 minutes, depending upon how finely they are sliced or chopped. When the water is boiled away, they are ready to serve. This works especially well with a combination of leeks and carrots. The only disadvantage is that the saucepan is now permanently discoloured brown, but as the one which is generally used for this task is thrity years old, it doesn't really matter.


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