Saturday, March 4th, 2006

Silly Rabbit

posted by lizzie    « 3 Comments »    tied to Uncategorized   

We have some friends who have an uncle who does a lot of gardening. He gave them four large bags of carrots. What he expected the two of them to do with four large bags of carrots, besides unload them on to others, I’ll never know. But since the only thing one couple can do with four large bags of carrots is give them away, we were the lucky recipients of one of the bags. We like carrots just fine. We eat them, we put them in soups and chicken pot pies and sometimes we eat them raw, but we were temporarily at a loss as to what we would do with all of our carrots. I say temporarily because it didn’t take long for someone (who shall remain nameless) to think that with so many carrots we could probably get a decently sized glass of carrot juice. The other of the two of us was skeptical, remembering that this suggestion was coming from the same person who unwittingly discovered that horchata, when cooked, can form an interesting pudding-like substance. However, since we managed to make some strangely delicious horchata milkshakes out of the said pudding, the skeptical one remained quiet. The skepticism was not unwarranted, however, as we do not own a juicer. We do not know anybody who owns a juicer. We have no means of extracting juice from something as dense as a carrot. But we do “rent” a food processor (it came with our fully furnished apartment), and that was good enough for the adventurous one. So Sunday night found us cutting carrots and putting them in the food processor. Half an hour later, when the large bag was reduced to 2/3 of its original glory, we had a food processor full of carrot “crumbs” and no juice. The adventurous one was undaunted. “All it needs is a little water, you know, to coax the juice out,” was the solution. Five minutes later we had wet carrot crumbs, no juice, and a plateful of peeled and chopped carrots. What do you do with carrot crumbs? What do you do with a plateful of carrots? Ah, carrot cake. Why didn’t we think of that before? We pulled out our cookbooks and searched for the one that needed the most carrots. It took only a few moments to find the recipe that would suit our needs: 2 cups sugar, 4 eggs, 2 cups plus 2 heaping tablespoons flour, 5 cups shredded carrots, 2 tsp. baking soda, 1 1/3 tsp. baking powder, 1 tsp. salt, 1 1/2 cups oil, 2 tsp. cinnamon all mixed up and baked at 350 for about 50 minutes. We were in business. We got to work “crumbing” almost all of our plate of carrots before we reached the 5 cup mark. It took another few minutes to mix everything up, and an hour later–VOILA! A delicious carrot cake emerged from the oven. Slap a little cream cheese frosting on top and mmmm mmmm. Dad, wish you were here.

Comments

  1. Abby says:
    March 4, 2006 at 9:28 pm

    So you would think that I could figure out which one was the one with all the bright ideas, and all that jazz, but I have to say I was completely stumped, and still don’t know who was which of the adventurous one and the other one.
    So true, Dad should have been there.

  2. Sarah says:
    March 5, 2006 at 11:49 pm

    I’m the same as Abby, only I think I might have an idea as to who is who, but one really does need to know who wrote it, but seeing as there is an aspiring journalist in the house . . . Some other ideas for getting rid of the carrots are carrot pie, carrot pudding (it may be a little chunky), carrot salad, carrot logs (like ants on a log . . . or something), or maybe they should do creative art projects with their plethora of carrots. I’ve just decided carrot is a weird word.

  3. Becca says:
    March 11, 2006 at 10:52 pm

    Just make sure you don’t turn yourselves orange with all those carrots! I guess that’s not really something to fear seeing as you turned in into carrot cake, but I was a little concerned when I first started reading that perhaps that was the unwelcome outcome. I am a carrot lover!

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