An Embarrassment of Carrots

On my way home from the grocery store, I went past the vegetable store and they had very large bags of carrots for 200 yen. I debated getting it. Then I went home and talked to James and decided that, yes, 200 yen for a giant bag of carrots was worth it, even if I didn't use many of them because to buy them in small quantities carrots cost around 20 yen apiece. So I'd only have to eat ten to make it worthwhile. I went back (with my bike this time, there was no way I was going to carry what I'm guessing was between 10 and 15 pounds of carrots any further than I had to) and got the carrots. Thankfully I didn't see anyone so I didn't have to explain what I was doing with that many carrots. Clearly, I am going to eat them. I just laid them all out on the floor and counted and there were 41 in the bag. Super cheap for food, even by American standards. I thought I was going to have to wash them but they seem to be very clean. Not clean enough to eat, but I guess the condensation in the bag might have been because they were put there while wet. I'm letting them dry and then I guess I'll stick them back in the bag. So far I've found a couple good ideas to make with them. Mostly, though, it's cutting them in circles and either baking or sauteeing them with sugar and butter to make them be like candied sweet potatoes. Carrot risotto will be good, I'm sure, and I can grate a carrot and cut up a second one for extra carrotiness. The most interesting recipe I saw was to cut them up into slices like noodles and thenfry them in butter until they're soft. That could also be done in the steamer and then I could put cheese on them like regular noodles. I just hope Aaron likes carrots....

Tonight I made something like spaghetti carbonara. It was sort of close to what I was aiming for, but I bought the generic store brand bacon, which tasted like lunch meat. And I used yakisoba (stirfry noodles) instead of actual spaghetti. I just rinsed them under my overly hot tap water and then dumped them in with the bacon (to which I had added a splash of white wine and ground pepper and oregano) in the wok and poured a beaten egg in. I didn't add enough pepper, and the bacon wasn't bacony enough to really make it work, so maybe if I try this again, I will buy more expensive bacon. It's not something I have a desire to eat that often, but I onlyused half the bacon, so I'll be eating bacon in something in the next couple weeks (I put it to freeze though, so who knows when it will reappear? Perhaps with a carrot).

Speaking of strange things to do to vegetables, I had bought lettuce about a week ago and had only eaten half of it... it was getting wilty so I had started looking for recipes to cook it (I had read a lettuce risotto recipe once), but when I went to tear it up it was still pretty crunchy, especially once I got past the first layer of leaves. So instead I bought some salad dressing. There was a sample lady with little cups of salad and 8 or 10 different dressings but I tasted one white creamy one and decided it was close enough to a creamy garlic or ranch. It's way liquidier than American dressing, it's really watery and not at all like dressing usually is. I like it a lot more than I like regular dressing because it's less goopy. And I can always put it on carrots, I guess.