Creamed carrots! One of my new favorite foods! These are a slightly simpler version of the previous Carotes a la Concierge with the ingredients being reduced pretty much to carrots, cream, and some spices. Don't get me wrong though, even though it is a variation of a previous dish I've made, I did still manage to have some drama. Preparation was different so here's the summary!
First of all, this carrot recipe is part of a series of carrot dishes that all start with the basic "Carottes Etuvees au Beurre" (carrots braised in butter) recipe. As a matter of fact, I could have cheated and dished some out, and taken a photo, and told you all about the braised carrots that I made. Yep, could have done that, and could have marked off another recipe cooked and wrote about. Yep, could have, should have, didn't. Guess we'll keep improving our vision as I cook more carrots.
Carottes Etuvees au Beurre is one of those fancy sounding recipes that is actually pretty straight forward. Slice up a bunch of carrots, boil them in some water with sugar, butter, salt, and a bit of pepper. That's it. Cook 'em and eat 'em. Hmmmmm, I wonder how they taste? Someday we'll all know. But for tonight I did some extra work, added more ingredients, and shortened the name to "Carottes a la Creme" (creamed carrots). More work, less letters. I guess they boiled off?
Once I finished up with the base recipe, I needed to boil some cream and add it to the cooked carrots. All of that was then boiled for another 15 minutes and the carrots absorbed that creamy goodness. I have no idea how the carrots knew to do that but they did! Of course, there was a bit of drama getting to this step. First of all, I had to bring the cream to a boil. Remember that silly burner I had trouble with once before? Yep - sure as shootin' I did it again. Wondering why the cream still wasn't boiling after 10 minutes and I finally realized that the burner was on low. Uggh. Once I actually turned the burner on high the cream came to a boil pretty quick.
Here's where I learned a new lesson. Did you know that cream goes from just sitting there, to having a bunch of little bubbles and in a couple of seconds they're big bubbles? Then the real surprise, as soon as the big bubbles appeared I picked up the saucepan to pour the cream into the pan with the carrots -- and that's when it started to act like one of those school science fair projects with the volcano spewing lava. As I lifted the saucepan that cream kept getting taller and taller and taller until it decided to start jumping over the edge of the pan. Lucky for me, I already had the pan in my hand and was headed to the carrots. You can see from my photo that I only made a little mess (and missed the burner -- no smoke this time!).
You can see the dish's progression in the photos at the end of this post and it was pretty cool. A bunch of cream covering the carrots and it all soaked into the carrots. Once it was done, I added parsley, chopped green onions (shhhhhh, don't tell Julia but I used green onions instead of chives) and (believe it or not) some softened butter.
Everyone seemed to like these and Kathryn gave them a 10 out of 10 rating so you know they were good. Another one that we'll be making again! By the way, don't worry, there are other vegetable recipes in the book besides carrots and I'll start working on them before too long.
Bon Appetit!
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