Little Oven 3
The Trouble with Carrots. A column about cooking for two with only an Instant Vortex Plus for a kitchen, a small countertop air-fryer oven.
I never thought I’d see the day when carrots would give me trouble.
Carrots and I have always been like two peas in a pod, perfectly happy together. There has never been anything particularly bold or gourmet about how I use carrots. When they’re sweet and crunchy I like them raw in peeled batons, on their own, or with extra virgin olive oil and dukkah to dip them in if I’m feeling extra.
In cooking I don’t tend to stray often from simply roasting carrots with herbs or preparing them Vichy style like my provincial French stepdad taught me, that is, boiling with a little sugar in the water to encourage a glaze and dressing them in excellent butter. In high school cooking class I learned to make Mirepoix, the “aromatics” trio of carrot, celery and onion fried softly that is one of the foundations of flavor used in French cooking, if not the primary one, and I’ve been employing it every since.
For the vortex oven, dressing peeled carrot sticks with regular olive oil, sea salt and black pepper and cooking them at Airfry400 for 7 minutes gives you a nicely roasted carrot batch. I like to toss them with room temperature green olives and pea shoots and just a drizzle of real balsamic vinegar.
As a vegetarian teen I was very proud of a sandwich I originated and called Refresh.
The filling was carrot, pineapple and unfashionable iceberg lettuce. Once peeled, the carrots where parred down into wafers with a vegetable peeler instead of grated. Shaving carrots into peels like this releases the water inside of them and gives you sweet ribbons of carrot instead of dry, chewy gratings. Fresh pineapple is shaved and shredded off the core with a sharp knife, and iceberg lettuce - specifically iceberg for the high water content and crunch, is sliced into ribbons. They were mixed well and dressed with sea salt and just a splash of very fashionable balsamic vinegar. I’d make up a sandwich spread with the silky type of feta cheese that is called Danish feta in Australia and lots of finely chopped vinegary picked onions. A large white bread roll would be spread with the pickled onion feta, and stuffed with the carrot-pineapple-iceberg salad.
For a year I worked as an International Travel Agent at Australia’s first internet travel agency. I’d had various jobs in the travel industry ever since I’d done my high school work experience as a check-in babe at a small airline which flew lightweight craft out to remote worksites at 15. By this time I was 23, had had lots of travel jobs and had backpacked in Europe and South-East Asia a little by myself, but I’d never had a job like this. There was no shop front. There was the website and the office, and we dealt with clients by phone only. Laughable as it seems now, booking travel this way was extraordinary in 2003.
My boss was a 28 year old son of a British diplomat who’d grown up entirely in English language boarding schools in places like Bulgaria and Vietnam. He’d disowned his family when he’d graduated from high school, joined the Communist Party and talked his way into a job as a trainee travel agent in London at 18, before moving to Australia with his Polish girlfriend in his mid 20s. He was six four and he strode around the office wielding a cane, thwacking it around and bellowing, “Answer the fucking phones!”
The job had its charms but it was relentless and relentlessly competitive. There were always industry events to attend and it was a heavy drinking culture. To cope with the anxieties and hangovers of work, not to mention the chaos of my personal life, I developed a super-hydrating salad which I packed for work almost everyday for lunch, first for my lunch alone, then enough for the other girls at the office whom it also soothed, and who named it The Good Salad.
The Good Salad’s foundation was cooked cold rice vermicelli noodles and wafer-thin carrot ribbons together with toothpicks of fresh ginger and pea shoots, and a dressing with the consistency of pesto but made from fresh cilantro and mint, cashews, fresh lime juice and zest, red Thai chili, soy sauce and sesame oil. I would often add ultra thin strips of capsicum, or bell peppers as they say in North America, and spring onions, but vermicelli, carrot ribbons and pea shoots were The Good Salad’s foundation. It was incredibly refreshing and very hangover friendly.
Carrots feature too in the cookbook I’m presently writing, in the form of Carrot Lang, an elegant, layered soup I’ve developed and am still tinkering with. I find myself struggling to produce a second truly satisfying carrot-based dish for the air-fryer oven. There are endless variants on dressing roasted carrots but with every bite I think, yeah, roasted carrot, it’s good, it’s nice, it’s perfectly acceptable, but I’m so bored.
I’d been avoiding getting into territory that requires carrot grating. Nigella Lawson always says the one kitchen job she hates doing is sieving. The one kitchen job I hate doing is grating. By the way, her carrot-featuring Vietnamese Chicken and Mint salad is very good whether or not you include the chicken. As is the carrot and peanut salad she and her mother before her kept alive, a little bit of salvage from the legendary, iconic London fashion department store Big Biba. The salad was a menu item in the store’s restaurant, The Rainbow Room.
There’s no way out of it. I’m giving in to fate and facing carrot grating. Coming up will be grated carrot recipes of my past adapted for air-fryer oven cooking: a tray-bake fritter inspired by latkes and rosti, and my take on a savory egg dish from the working class kitchens of my childhood in Australia: Carrot Zucchini Slice.