Cooking With Mollie #14: Coconut Ginger Carrot Gratin

Coconut Ginger Carrot Gratin is something I would never have thought of on my own. Carrots, yes, ginger yes, but coconut? The only other time I have encountered this combination is in Morning Glory muffins (carrot, pineapple, coconut and raisin) and my imagination wouldn't have stretched that mix to a vegetable side dish.

But Mollie Katzen does it in the book I'm cooking my way through - "The Vegetable Dishes I Can't Live Without."


It starts with a saute of sliced fresh carrots, onions, garlic, salt and fresh ginger.

Toward the end of the cooking, you add diced crystallized ginger and lemon juice. The mixture is spread in a baking dish, baked for 20 minutes, and taken out of the oven.

The top is sprinkled with shredded coconut, and baked until the coconut gets a little brown. Voila.


I was afraid when I made it, because so many coconut things are vile to me. I remember trying one coconut shrimp after hearing about how great they were. I was appalled to find this giant hairy looking shrimp on my plate, tasting for all the world like a macaroon with a shrimp jammed inside. Yuck.

This is tasty, though. The carrots are quite strongly flavored, and, as Mollie says, reminiscent of the Caribbean. It might make a nice side dish for fish.

Bon Appetit.

Cooking With Mollie #6: Coated Carrots Afrique du Nord

I had to step out of the cruciferous vegetables family briefly to deal with carrots. I had a lot of carrots in the fridge, so I decided to make this recipe from Mollie Katzen's "The Vegetable Dishes I Can't Live Without."

Coated Carrots Afrique du Nord (recipe online at Leite's Culinaria)

It involves several techniques: first, you toast cumin seeds in a frying pan, then add ground cumin and cinnamon and toast them too. A blob of butter goes in, then garlic, then carrots cut diagonally into 1/4 slices.

You add some orange juice and salt and saute for a bit. This, to me, gave the carrots an unnervingly nasty scent. Don't worry - they don't taste like this smells.

The carrots get spread on a baking tray in a single layer. Sorry, bad iphone photos.

Bake at 400 for 15 minutes, stirring every 5 minutes or so. Take them out and let them cool for 5 minutes. Sprinkle with lemon juice and your choice of garnishes - a bit of honey, finely chopped fresh mint, or red pepper flakes.

Since it is the middle of winter and my mint plants are dead, I chose the rich, warm Aleppo Pepper flakes from my favorite place, Penzey's Spcies.

The verdict? I have to try this recipe again. The carrots tasted lovely, as you might expect. Cumin, cinnamon, peppers - how can you go wrong? Well, the wrong part, to me, was the texture. They were chewy. I mean, pretty darn chewy. "It's not the taste, it's the texture" levels of chewy.

Perhaps my oven wasn't hot enough. Maybe I didn't leave them in long enough. Or it could be that I made a mistake in using those little peeled supermarket bagged "baby carrots" that aren't really baby carrots at all.

I'll set this one aside for another day, because I think if I get it right, it will be fabulous.