Roasted Jumbo Carrots

An easy, rustic, and budget friendly side dish that looks like a million bucks!  Roasted Jumbo Carrots are browned and charred on the outside, but soft and tender on the inside. Perfectly seasoned and a great side dish to serve with almost any meal!

ROASTED JUMBO CARROTS

Since McKenna has become addicted to K-Pop music, and has started to embrace different Asian cultures, shopping at Asian-influenced grocery stores has become a weekend family affair.  To be completely honest, I love it!  It’s a whole new world of foods that I have never tried before! That’s exactly how these Roasted Jumbo Carrots came to be! 

For the past few weeks, I have been toying with recipes both in my head and in my kitchen. I will post them and share them with you when they are perfected. In the meantime, I need to talk about these carrots.  A few months ago, I was researching recipes that featured carrots as the main ingredient. 

I had purchased bags of fresh veggies from a coworker’s daughter, who was selling them through a fund-raiser at her school.  While waiting for the veggies to be delivered, I forgot what I had ordered.  I was sure that fifteen pounds of carrots were on the way. So, I had been thinking about carrot recipes for the few weeks leading up to the anticipated vegetable delivery.

But, when those veggies arrived, there were no carrots.  I had ordered sweet potatoes instead.  All of my carrot recipe enthusiasm needed to be pushed aside so that I could determine which recipes I would create using sweet potatoes instead.  Fifteen pounds of sweet potato is a lot!  I ended up making a delicious Roasted Sweet Potato Soup out of most of the sweet potatoes.  But, if memory serves me correctly, I gave a bunch of the sweet potatoes to our neighbours.

VISIT YOUR LOCAL ASIAN SUPERMARKET

Fast forward four or five months later. McKenna, John.e and myself are perusing through the produce section at a new Asian grocery store.  I say new, because previously, we would visit the same one over and over.  But, at the suggestion of Lesli and Aaron – two of my coworkers – we decided to visit a second option.  This one was so much better than we had ever anticipated.  And, that, Dear Reader, is where my carrot recipe obsession was once again reignited.

I found these carrots in the produce section.  I’m used to buying carrots in bags.  We tend to buy smaller, organic carrots, because we like to eat them raw with hummus.  (We very rarely buy bagged baby carrots, because we don’t like the chemically taste.)  And, we feel that smaller carrots have a better taste when eating them raw.

But, when cooking with carrots, especially if they’re in a soup or if I’m roasting them, bigger carrots are just fine.  In this particular case, these carrots were huge!  They were so bright orange, and very firm, and super clean too.  I picked up about six with the intention of roasting them in big circular fashion like you see in the photographs.  Preheating the oven at a high temperature is the key to browning them. And, that’s just the look I was trying to achieve.

A VERY HOT OVEN WILL BROWN THEM NICELY

I don’t want you to think that these carrots are burnt.  They are most definately not.  They are browned and have lovely – very tasty – charred bits on the outside.  The inside though, is soft, yet still firm.  They are not soft to the point of being mushy.  The high heat will quickly cook the outside of the carrots, which will lock in the flavour and steam the inside.  Seriously, Dear Reader, you have to give this approach a try!

The addition of the ground black pepper, salt, dried thyme and grated nutmeg, take these to a whole new level.  Perfect paired with a main on any night of the week. Or, pile them high on a bright blue platter like you see here, Jumbo Roasted Carrots can add style and flavour to even your most beautiful Thanksgiving meal!

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