Friday, August 31, 2012

Sneaky Carrots


A Great Aunt of mine was visiting the first time I served Red Velvet Cake with Red Beets. She was so excited because she is a cafeteria cook for a public school in Iowa. She started telling me all the sneaky ways that she adds vegetables to the food that she prepares for the students. I was curious so she told me to get a cookbook called The Sneaky Chef. I did and I have incorporated some sneaky tactics into my cooking. It helped that my Grandad had a bumper crop of carrots. I got this many carrots 3 times...

Upon arrival at my house the carrots were dirty...
...so I dumped them in the metal washtub and scrubbed them...while talking on the phone...that made it more enjoyable...
 and then I peeled all of those carrots. It was a different evening and I happened to be talking on the phone again...to my mother-in-law...for an hour. I got a crick in my neck that evening! This is just some of the carrots I peeled that night.
 Then I cooked them until they were nice and soft.
 Then I put those soft carrots in the 1970's, well maybe 1980's, food processor that my mother-in-law unearthed from her basement. It was free and it has now been well used! This is a bowl of carrot puree.
 I froze it in one cup portions in freezer bags. This batch made 24 bags.
 What do I do with all of this carrot puree? I add it to every red sauce I use. In our house, so far, it has been served in spaghetti, ravioli, ziti, and pizza sauce. Pizza is a once a week occurrence here and I generally make pasta one other night in the week so about twice a week my kids eat carrots!

Instead of making this a mile long post I'll share my other sneaky experiments separately.

1 comment:

Christy said...

nice! I like this and may start doing it myself! Do you find that it changes the texture or taste of the sauces you use it in at all?

email me please...I never remember to come back and check for answers here. =)