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.

Cooking With Mollie #5: Roasted Red Peppers with Garlic and Lime

I had this recipe done a couple of days ago and I had to keep holding myself back from posting it. It is so good I wanted to share it immediately. If I had your phone numbers, I would have called you all and told you about it.

I present, from Mollie Katzen's genius cookbook "The Vegetable Dishes I Can't Live Without" (yes, I'm going to keep linking it up every day. It's genius, and don't you think I owe her at least that for the joy she gives me?)

Roasted Red Peppers Marinated With Garlic And Lime (yay, Mollie has the actual recipe online).

Could not be simpler. Mollie calls for four red peppers. I had a yellow and a red, so I forged ahead and made adjustments, as we do.

You roast them in a 400 degree oven on a lightly oiled baking sheet, flipping them every 8 minutes or so, until they look like this, maybe 20-30 minutes: You put them in the bowl, put a plate on as a lid, a technique I thought I had invented, but Mollie knew it too. A lot of skinning peppers techniques say to put them in a plastic or paper bag, but hello! 1) Weird hot plastic chemicals and 2) these things leak liquid, so ooh, gross. Bowl. Plate. Trust me and Mollie on this one.

You let them steam in the bowl while you do something else. Then you come back and peel and scrape the skins off with a sharp knife and messily deseed and de-stem them. Chop or slice into rajas (hey, Spanish! But they have a word for "strips of peppers" and we don't. So "rajas") as you wish.

Chop. Drizzle with olive oil, a little chopped garlic, salt and pepper. This is where I would normally stop. But NOW the magic Mollie moment: LIME JUICE.

Lime juice. I would have never thought of that in a million years and yet once you do it, it seems so obvious. The acid perks up the flavor and adds a happy little note of brightness.

I have a secret for you: you could do this with rinsed roasted peppers from a jar. Don't tell your guests.

I ate mine on sprouted wheat toast with jalapeno goat cheese. Pretty dang good. Make this. Eat it. Enjoy.

Cooking with Mollie #4: Sesame Leeks and Cabbage

Do not turn away. I know it's cabbage, but man, this dish is good. It's one of those simple things that will leave you wondering "Why didn't I think of that?"

How simple is it? You don't even need a recipe, really, though you definitely should buy Mollie Katzen's book, "The Vegetable Dishes I Can't Live Without."

No, she isn't paying me to say that. I'm just hoping for a dinner invite when I get done with this. Yeah. We saw how well that worked out for Julie in the Julie Julia movie. (If you didn't see the movie, there is some indication that Mrs. Child was NOT pleased at Julie's blogging efforts about Mastering the Art of French Cooking.)

Back to how simple the recipe is: You slice some leeks and wash them. Coupla leeks if you can get the big fat ones like I get from the organic farm, probably 4 or 5 if you can only find small ones. You chop some cabbage, 4 cups more or less.

Saute the leeks with some oil in a deep pan for about 10 minutes, then throw the cabbage in, cover, voila.

Saute, stirring occasionally, until everything begins to stick to the bottom of the pan, so you'll have some lovely browned bits mixed in.

Salt. Pepper. A drizzle of dark sesame oil. A sprinkle of toasted sesame seeds. You're done!

Except I wasn't done. I cooked up some noodles from a yaki soba package (throw the nasty seasoning away) and sauteed tofu chunks to mix with the cabbage for a nice hot lunch.

I thought of a great alternative to this recipe, too - instead of a drizzle of sesame oil, use roasted walnut oil and chopped walnuts. This would be especially good if you could swap out the cabbage for the delicate crinkly Savoy cabbage. Savoy cabbage season lasts about 3 weeks around here, so I'll have to try that next year. I can't wait.

Bon appetit.

Cooking with Mollie #3: Spicy Brussels Sprouts Pickles

You either love Brussels Sprouts or hate them. If you're in the second category, it is my life mission to convert you to the Cult of the Sprout. I love them. I love them steamed, boiled, roasted, shredded into confetti and sauteed...but until this week, I had never loved them pickled. It's simple. You start with about half a pound of fresh sprouts. Peel off the ugly outside leaves. I always peel the outside leaves even if they aren't ugly, because that's where dirt and aphids hide. Cut them in half if they are large (and most sprouts that I can find lately are large). Then you cook them for just a couple minutes in a large pot of boiling, salted water. I always cook vegetables in heavily salted water because Thomas Keller does, and well, THOMAS KELLER. Drain and rinse them in cold water: They will be a beautiful bright green. Enjoy that color now, because it's about to change. Ah well, c'est la vie. Then you submerge them in a pickling liquid that is made of 2/3 of a cup of hot water with 1 tbsp of honey mixed in (you could use sugar, too) and 1 tsp of salt. Mollie says to use seasoned rice vinegar, but I had a better idea! I used my spicy peppered vinegar from the Asian market. The spicy vinegar (the one on the left) was perfect. It added a nice zippiness. Someone suggested you could include these sprouts in a Bloody Mary and to that I say yay, yes you could. If you can't find spicy vinegar, you could probably just toss in a teaspoon or two of red pepper flakes, depending on how spicy you wanted them. I put a plate on top of the sprouts to ensure they stayed submerged in the pickling liquid. A few hours later, they looked like this: They are a great little snack. You don't want to eat too many at once, just one or two with a sandwich or cheese plate. Store them in their liquid in the fridge in a glass or ceramic container. Recipe adapted from Mollie Katzen's "Vegetable Dishes I Can't Live Without."

Cooking with Mollie: Green Beans Almandine

Recipe Two from Mollie Katzen's "Vegetable Dishes I Can't Live Without," Green Beans Almandine. I don't like this recipe. There's nothing wrong with it - the flavors are fine, and it is a classic. Green beans. Almonds, butter, olive oil, garlic. What's to hate? It's the interface. Green beans and almonds are the wrong shape to stick together. So you end up eating green beans with a few shreds of almonds stuck to them, and have a pile of almonds left at the end. What do you do with them? Scoop them up off the plate in the kitchen with your fingers like a savage? Well, yeah, of course. Here's how it looks - pretty! Recipe is online here.