I don't watch cooking shows, but I'm starting to think I should. I get recipes one of two ways: cookbooks and the internet. We keep buying cookbooks, so I often start there. On occasion, I ask google to tell me how to cook food. Tonight, Google led me to a recipe by Rachel Ray for baby carrots.
Lately, we either have our carrots steamed on the grill with red and yellow peppers or raw. I'm not very adventurous. Today, I wanted to cook carrots to accompany our dinner, and Mark didn't want to visit the grill. Since I'm not really familiar with cooking carrots on the stove-top, Rachel Ray and Google to the rescue.
The recipe called for a pound and a half of carrots, 3 tablespoons of butter, a tablespoon of sugar, and 1 teaspoon of coarse salt. I used seasalt because it looked pretty coarse. I only had a pound of carrots, and let's face it...that's more than Mark and I need to eat in a sitting. Other than that, there were no intentional changes.
The instructions called for the carrots to be placed in a half inch of water, with the butter, sugar, and salt added. The first mistake I made was in estimating how deep an inch of water looks in the pan. After I had everything in the pan, I had to dump some water out. Since the recipe was on my computer and I was in the kitchen, other mishaps ensured. I put in three tablespoons of sugar, rather than one. I also recalled the recipe saying it only took fifteen minutes. I was thinking it needed to cook for fifteen minutes, but it actually was fifteen minutes including prep time, with the water only boiling for a short time. I boiled it for over ten minutes, trying to get the liquid level down.
Because I was behind in getting my chicken into the oven, all my sides finished early. This meant that my carrots sat on the stove over low heat for another ten minutes or so. It turns out that all of my mistakes came together to create amazing carrots!
Tonight's carrots were the best cooked carrots I have ever had. They were very sweet, which I'm sure some people would not like. They were also perfectly cooked. They weren't too water logged, nor were they too hard. They were pleasantly firm with a nice, sweet glaze on them. Frankly, I now have a third way to cook carrots, and I'm very happy about that.
If you don't like carrots, give this recipe a try. If it was this tasty when I messed it up, it must be amazing when done right! I'm going to have to go buy more carrots so I can make them again...
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