Focus on... root crops! Part ONE.

Over the holiday break we featured: The Carrot.

The carrot is orange. Which is a bonus.

With the carrot I paired fresh turmeric, which showed up in the market. Turmeric is also orange. O, how it is orange. It made my lovely little blue-and-white apron orange forever. Now it is an Apron of the Gator Nation. (Titletown, woo.)

More on aprons to follow in a later post.

Turmeric doesn't have much taste to it. But they say it has the antioxidants or what have you. You got to figure anything that brightly colored has to be doing something, good or bad. So I sliced it up with the carrots and threw it in a pan with some butter and oil and baked it. I put other stuff in there that was orange, namely kumquats. It made an interesting, marmeladey side dish.

Then later I baked up a bunch of carrots without the additions and pureed them and made pumpkin pie out of carrots. You know how people will try to pass off sweet potato pie as pumpkin pie and it is forever the saddest thing? Well, that has happened in our family the past couple of Christmases to everyone's great sorrow, so I decided to take action to ensure it will never happen again by passing off carrot pie as pumpkin pie. I think I have dealt the death blow to the yam pie gambit.

RESOLVED:
Carrot pie? Not a substitute for pumpkin pie.

OTOH?
Carrot pie: weirdly not bad!

It's surprising. Neither carrot nor sweet potato makes a bad pie. Nevertheless, if they are handled like pumpkin, both carrot and sweet potato make a disappointing pie.

So some out-of-box thinking needs to obtain. A wholly new and separate pie modality for orange, pasty things that aren't pumpkin must be developed. One possible solution might be citrus.