Carrot Days

Warmth and ingenuity on a cold day

I apologize for the two day lateness. Turns out that training yourself not to panic is quite all encompassing but I’m getting the hang of it. See you Saturday for another America Eats! Shorts.

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Every time I walk into the vegetable store I am taken over by feelings of both delightful competency and frightful ignorance. Brussel sprouts, leeks, spinach, Swiss chard, are encouraging pleasures; dragon fruit, bitter gourd, winter melon, celtuce are scary mysteries. Recipes immediately pop to mind for the first. Furious internet searches right there in the aisles for the second don’t even begin to explain what in God’s name I’m looking at.

There is firmer ground in the root section among all the different onions, potatoes, turnips and rutabagas. Two weeks ago, I contemplated the tumbling mountain of carrots with a level of enthusiasm that some may consider excessive.

I’ve eaten carrots my whole life. My husband has a full custard cup of them every night before dinner. Even our old dog loved them. I filled two huge bags in the market and, nine dollars later, unpacked them on the kitchen counter with the ambition to make carrot ginger stew and, of course, carrot cake. There they sat for a week and a half, neglected and fuming over how long it was taking to turn them into something everyone in the world would love.

They were on the road to softening when I finally peeled half the pile. The stew was ready in less than two hours. With the addition of chunks of very spicy merguez sausage and crushed peanuts and cilantro strewn across the top, we all settled down to enjoy it during the L.A. Rams vs. Philadelphia Eagles football game.

The cake was another matter. It used to be a household staple because it was easy and made me feel I was succeeding in getting my kids to eat vegetables. These were the days when my needy toddlers grew into rambunctious adolescents, and eventually, God deliver me, surly teenagers.

(A parenting tip from that era: buy yourself a few moments of peace by sliding a plate of moist, not too sweet, carrot cake with thick icing before them. This may not work for girls but it sure appeases boys for at least five minutes. )

My insistence on finding the tattered piece of paper that contained a recipe from a friend’s mother was no excuse for almost two weeks of procrastination. Eventually, I settled on a perfectly good substitute among the vast pile of carrot cake recipes that exist in this world.

I chose one for a 9 x13-inch sheet cake and then proceeded to make the rookie mistake of pouring the batter into a 2 1/2 inch deep by 7 inch wide spring form pan. There was no sound reason for this decision other than it being one of my topsy-turvy moments. The prescribed baking time of 35 minute had to be extended another 20 minutes before my skewer came out clean. Removed from the oven, the cake looked okay. It was a little wobbly in the center but it was a moist batter and would congeal overnight in the refrigerator. Next day, I removed the pan’s sides and the cake, like slow moving lava, oozed across the counter.

What to do? How about spooning the uncooked mess into small tart pans then maybe cooking them at 350 degrees for 15 or 20 minutes?

It worked! My sons agreed that the little calamity cakes were almost as terrific as the carrot cake of their youth.

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I’ve written about two more successful carrot cakes in the series I devoted to Ms. Johana, the doyenne of one of the oldest community gardens in Brooklyn. The first is a tale about the time she made her famous rum carrot cake for a gathering of non-drinking Jehovah Witnesses. The second contains her recipe.

The Drunken Carrot Cake Incident

Ms. Johana’s Carrot Cake Recipe

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News of Note:

A special holiday
February 3rd is National Carrot Cake Day. Who knew?! 

Remembering the photographer of the Ali-Frazier first match
George Kalinsky, the official photographer for Madison Square Garden took the most vocative photographs of the first Ali-Joe Frazier match, recently died at 88. No information was given for the date but there’s a hell of an obit in The New York Times this morning.

And another thing…..

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