Old-Fashioned Carrot Salad
- By Katie Roche
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- 08 Dec, 2018
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It just does not bode well when you turn the page to a recipe and start going, "Ew ew ew ew ew ew"' like you're in that Jimmy Fallon skit. I realize that's a juvenile attitude about something I've never tried but one scan of the ingredients list and this whole situation was a serious NOPE. I guess Ina missed the memo about how once you put mayonnaise in something, it is NOT A SALAD ANYMORE. And Midwest, if you feel attacked, you should. I love you all, but you need to cut it out with the mayonnaise-in-salads - both for our taste buds and for the worldwide obesity epidemic.
Here we have it - all of the ingredients for this monstrosity of a dish. Dan item quested for this one, at Publix at 8:30 on a Sunday night after we had played a hockey game. He says that nothing dramatic happened, which is great, because honestly, this photo contains all of the drama I can really handle. These things don't belong together. I do, however, have a few things to say about the ingredients. I didn't read the sidenotes ahead of time and I should have, because Ina swears that the "carrots with the green tops" are sweeter so I should use those. I am confident than Ina has never had an Alaska Grown carrot, and once you have had one of those, all other carrots taste bland anyway so I don't really feel like it matters that much to me. If you can't get Alaska Grown carrots, store-bought, topless carrots are fine. Second, Ina likes to emphasize that you should use "the good mayonnaise" and she specifically recommends Hellmann's. Despite living in an area with a weird level of devotion to a local brand of mayonnaise (Duke's), I am also Team Hellmann's and do not even feel the need to try Duke's. Hellmann's (or, as it is branded on the west coast, Best Foods) has had mayo on lockdown since I was a kid and nobody else needs to try. This is the only mayonnaise that we as a society will ever need. Finally, the lemon Dan picked out is insanely perfect. Close ups of that later...I took pics of that thing like it was my firstborn child. Too bad we offered it up as tribute to something so supremely disgusting.
She has you start by soaking the golden raisins in hot water, and she doesn't say why, but I know from other recipes of hers that the point of soaking your raisins is to rehydrate them and get them a lil plump. She has you do this with rum in other instances, but I guess this recipe was at capacity for disgusting ingredients so she let us off easy and we just soak them in water. I give thanks for this small mercy. Then we shred carrots. She says if you lay them like this, it makes the best shreds. I wonder which of her kitchen assistants wasted half an hour laying carrot chunks different ways in the top of a Cuisinart to determine this? But whatever, we will benefit from this advice.
Despite this, I was still left with those annoying lil flat pieces that the Cuisinart can't quite get. Oh well. I'd eat them, but they're not Alaska Grown carrots and I'm just not that pumped about them because of that.
Only took me like five tries to get them all shredded.
After popping these in a bowl, you sprinkle them with lemon juice and sugar. (IF THEY WERE ALASKA GROWN YOU WOULDN'T NEED SUGAR OK I'M DONE) I just...is this a dish for Elf? Sugar on carrots? I just don't get why, especially if we're about to add lots of acidic and creamy things. Ugh. So I juiced the lemon, and here are some beautiful lemon pics because that was honestly the best part of making this.
I don't think I'll ever get over the fact that it gave its life for this supremely nasty "salad". It's just not okay. This could have been lemonade. It could have gone into a vinaigrette, or been drizzled on my favorite Smitten Kitchen sheet pan dinner of roasted potatoes and sausage on a bed of arugula. It could have been lemon curd. Alas, it's the acid element for a salad that shouldn't exist.
Why. (Actually, I kind of tried to find out why and all Wiki really said was that, as far as its usage in America goes, this is traditional to the southern United States. Which I guess kind of tells us why. God forbid they should just let a vegetable be a vegetable. So there's that.)
The lil flecks you see - that's pepper. This is straight up just mayo, sour cream, salt, and pepper - a group of things that should never ever get together with carrots and sugar. (And yeah, not even in cake. I am pretty against carrot cake as a concept. Have carrots or have cake. Pick a lane, guys.) So you pour all of this into the carrots, add the raisins and pineapple, and mix it up.
Dan looked at it and said it was "vegetable ambrosia" - I just learned about ambrosia from his friends on our trip to Connecticut, and I was obviously horrified, given that I was brought up to not want to partake of any mixture my dad might label "prison food". (I'm slowly recovering - I now eat spaghetti.) I just visited ambrosia's Wiki page. It's as horrifying as this, and perhaps moreso so since it involves maraschino cherries. Thank goodness I don't have to make that. So anyway, I forced Dan to take a bite of this with me and he just made a face and put his fork in the dishwasher. My bite was, to borrow words my coworker used to describe cucumber soup, "from a child's nightmare". For some reason it's like, sour and creamy and aggressively salty all at once in all of the wrong ways.
So I let this...fester in the fridge overnight, and then foisted it upon my forewarned coworkers who liked it about as much as I expected they would.
So I let this...fester in the fridge overnight, and then foisted it upon my forewarned coworkers who liked it about as much as I expected they would.
The first contestant on this unfortunate game show was Michael, otherwise known as my "good eater". I was especially hesitant about giving this to him, good sport though he is, because I don't want to wear him out on all the weird ones. He's one of the only people I know who is willing to try any food I give him without exception, so I took advantage of his grace and plated him some carrot salad. He did not enjoy it. He is the best, and always tries to offer blog-able commentary for me, so regarding this he said that he was feeling it okay until the pepper hit. He said the pepper is what ruined it. (Really though? The pepper? It wasn't ruined immediately by carrots mixing with a bunch of creamy stuff? I mean, okay.)
This is Garrett, the one who described the cucumber soup as "from a child's nightmare" (I've already said I find that more of an apt description for this), and he, surprisingly enough, said it was tolerable though not something he would ever request. He did pick out the raisins though, which is a critical layer to the depth of its heinousness so maybe that has something to do with why he found it tolerable. On an unrelated note, he is not a soda can hoarder; he is building a "Christmas tree" out of all of our ginger ale, lime La Croix, and Mountain Dew cans. Every office should be lucky enough to have a Garrett.
Aaaaaand, best reaction for last, this is Esteban demonstrating how he felt about it. He wanted me to make a Boomerang of this and include it, but I told him I'm not technologically gifted enough to figure out how to do that. So he said I could take a picture of him pretending to barf. No joke though, in real life when he took a bite of it, he literally spit it out. Not pictured are Joe and Alex, who each took a bite and promptly had me throw it in the trash. We did not even make it through the entire bowl of it between all of us; I took it home where it met my good friend The Garbage Disposal.
My suspicion is that this is one of those foods that people ate back in the day, like in or around the same era during which Jell-O molds were a thing. (There is a familial recipe for one of those in our family to this day, which my dad taught us all to call "Red Death".) As much as Ina has tried to convince us that she's cool by having her close personal friend Taylor Swift on her show, I think she has accidentally revealed her status as a crusty old person here by making something so colossally disgusting, it can only be something a previous generation ate out of respect for their elders or whatever. So I'm going to ask that if you're reading this, would you please find the nearest old person and see if this is something that sounds appetizing to them? I need to confirm if Ina really thinks this is Back to Basics or if she actually just went Back to 1950?
My suspicion is that this is one of those foods that people ate back in the day, like in or around the same era during which Jell-O molds were a thing. (There is a familial recipe for one of those in our family to this day, which my dad taught us all to call "Red Death".) As much as Ina has tried to convince us that she's cool by having her close personal friend Taylor Swift on her show, I think she has accidentally revealed her status as a crusty old person here by making something so colossally disgusting, it can only be something a previous generation ate out of respect for their elders or whatever. So I'm going to ask that if you're reading this, would you please find the nearest old person and see if this is something that sounds appetizing to them? I need to confirm if Ina really thinks this is Back to Basics or if she actually just went Back to 1950?
For this post, I wanted to combine two summertime flavors into the crisp recipe one of my oldest Alaskan friends passed on to me years ago. Rhubarb, if you're unfamiliar, is a reddish stalk that kind of resembles really big celery. It's very tart and is most commonly paired with strawberry. I've rarely seen it star in its own show dessert-wise, but my friend Kylee has been making rhubarb crisp for years and it's the best crisp I know of. Blueberries are usually in season in late summer; I have not been home for a blueberry season since Dan's last deployment in 2018 so in order to make this recipe I actually used blueberries from a friend's parents' farm in upstate SC! They're a little sweeter than the blueberries I'd have picked at home, but they worked well. I'm going to pretend like I was actually picking blueberries at home in Alaska for the purpose of showing you what that would look like.
I was getting all ready to write this post, going through my process with photos starting in my kitchen when I realized that a lot of my friends probably don't know what fireweed is or where it comes from and this recipe actually starts far, far away from my kitchen. This will be the first of a few posts highlighting iconic Alaskan ingredients. I've wanted to do this for a while because my home inspires me in so many ways, writing and cooking particular among them. Fireweed is a wildflower that is rather ubiquitous in southcentral Alaska and is often considered a gauge for how long summer will last. It is said that when the blooms reach the top of the plant, winter is six weeks away. Whether or not that's accurate, fireweed is found all over in late summer in Alaska. Here is some I spotted in mid-July by Eklutna Lake:
If you know Dan and me very well, you probably know by now that if our life were a sitcom, he'd low-key be the funniest character. Because that is true, I thought I'd include his bottom ten with accompanying remarks before giving the actual bottom ten. His are hilarious, but aren't as legitimate as mine because he actually tried way fewer of these than one might think. I realized as he was flipping through the book that my old coworker Cam probably ate more of these foods than anyone else did. The overarching theme of Dan's song of Ina Garten hatred is not the actual taste of the finished product but more how asinine he finds that particular recipe to be. So here you are, Dan's bottom ten.
#1: Butternut Squash Soup
#1: Butternut Squash Soup
You guys asked for my top ten from the blog, so here we go! And I'm thinking that what you *really* want is actually the bottom ten, so I'll go ahead and give you those next week. That post will probably be A LOT funnier. While preparing to write this post, I had Dan flip through the cookbook to give me HIS top ten and he was all disgruntled as he did so and only came up with eight that he even liked at all. "I'm not a picky eater!" he insists. Yeah ok. Although to be fair, I've seen some cookbooks I would only make, like, one thing out of and plenty I'd make nothing out of, though sometimes that's because I find the chef so annoying. @ the Pioneer Woman. I just don't trust someone who puts sour cream in spaghetti and then bakes it. Plus all her recipe intros are about, like, Ladd or Tadd or whatever the heck her husband's name is "coming in from the fields starving for dinner". If I came in from working in a field and you tried to give me sour cream spaghetti, I'd be like, "How about a hot pocket instead? Thx." Anyway, this is not Dan's blog so these are not his top ten. You can ask him which ones he liked, but you'll end up in a long convo about how much he hates Ina Garten. Anyway, these are not ranked or anything, they're just in order from the cookbook.
So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
It was Sunday afternoon and I thought to myself, "What a perfect time to make jam!" I mean, how positively quaint: just sitting in my home in suburbia, finished with weekend chores, relaxing with some knitting...why not? Why not make some jam? I mean, obviously my afternoon-kitchen-activity was directed toward jam-making because it was next up in the book BUT whatever, I was kind of excited! Also, this is the last recipe in this book!!! I'm still in the process of deciding what I'll do now, so if there's something you'd like me to make and tell you about in my own fashion - you know, with lots of tangents and jokes - please do let me know! I'll likely continue to tackle Ina content, but may start including some recipe faves and/or foods people text me about a lot! I get a lot of cake questions, a LOT of frosting questions (because meringue buttercream is bae and I've got everyone in my social circles who eats my food on board), and a lot of fish questions. So look for more food to come, even though this is the last recipe in Back to Basics.
We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
I was glad Ina gave me something easy for this week, because I was packing for Alaska and just *did not have the time* to mess with hunting lobsters or weird cheeses from the internet or whatever. ItemQuest was fairly straightforward, just took Dan a trip to the liquor store next to the Publix for some limoncello. I grabbed this particular lemon curd in the British aisle of Publix; I think last time an Ina recipe called for lemon curd I bought it from Trader Joe's and it was DISGUSTING. I mean, truly awful. I would like to recommend making your own lemon curd if you have the time and the inclination. Ina's lemon curd recipe is phenomenal and it is one thing for which I can say she is truly correct: homemade is BETTER and store-bought is not at all as good. The most beloved cupcakes I have ever made were filled with Ina's lemon curd, and had the lemon curd mixed into the meringue buttercream frosting. HIGHLY RECOMMEND!!! Anyway, the rest of this was fruit that I had on hand, mint, and Greek yogurt which we did have to buy because I don't, as a rule, eat Greek yogurt of my own free will. It's chalky and disgusting.
Dates are something I honestly never even thought about until I did Whole 30. I have mentioned my Whole 30 experience several times over the course of this journey through Back to Basics, but if you're new to reading the blog, this is what happened: I did Whole 30 one time, just to prove that I could, because salvation-by-diet apologists were obsessed with it as the newest fad in righteous eating practices. It was a terrible experience; on top of hating every minute of it for myself and finding exactly zero wellness benefits, I also hated it for Dan who was not allowed to eat popcorn for 30 days. Dan is in love with popcorn; his addiction to it is almost at the level of my addiction to coffee. He gets rage-y without it. But anyway, Whole 30 recipes are big into dates as sweeteners and some of the things you can eat, like Lara Bars, are made with dates. Dates are impossibly chewy. I ate more of them in that 30 days than I ever wanted to, and now when I see them in recipes I can't help but think of that Whole 30. Fortunately for me, I got to begin this recipe by chopping TWO CUPS' worth of dates. Oh, they also kind of look like cockroach bodies, so there's that. The only thing I actually had to get at the store for this was oranges! I had everything else on hand, even Cointreau, thanks to many previous Ina recipes.
Alright so, I'm not the Muffin Man. I don't really make a whole lot of muffins, for a lot of reasons, one of the main ones being that on the rankings of breakfast foods they definitely do not crack the top five, maybe not even the top ten. If I have an option for a bagel or a waffle, I'll pick one of them over a muffin every single time. I also prefer cereal, cinnamon rolls, or *cue eye roll* avocado toast. I've just never risen from my slumber and been like, "You know what would really hit the spot right now? A MUFFIN." But!!! In recent months, since my friend Logan came into my life, I've been making muffins a lot more frequently because he really loves them. So the last blueberry muffins I made were from a 99cent Betty Crocker mix packet which he brought into my house and asked me sweetly to make, because they're what he grew up with and along with many preservatives, they are full of nostalgia for him. Here is Logan and me, preparing to mix the muffin batter. Out of respect (and to make up for the disrespect of rolling up with muffin mix), he wore one of my aprons. I will treasure this picture forever.
You guys...Ina has "a thing" about commercial granola bars. Her beef with them, apparently, is that they say they contain real fruit and nuts but that all she sees when she looks at the labels are like, ten different kinds of corn syrup. I'm going to go ahead and guess, just based on this, that none of the lunches her mom packed for her growing up contained any Fruit By the Foot. And surely if we introduced her to Gushers, she would die. This is a real shame. I also feel like this disdain for corn syrup is maybe just a tad self-righteous, coming from the woman whose frosting recipe calls for literally six entire sticks of butter. At that point, what's a little corn syrup to you really? People's nutritional hills-to-die-on really fascinate me (and also kind of annoy me sometimes) and the ones about sugar might get me the most. I feel like, at some point, sugar is sugar and whether you're baking with honey, white sugar, brown sugar, molasses, maple syrup, etc you're still probably making something that's not amazing for you so, in terms of sugar, why not just be in for a penny in for a pound, amirite? So while I'm on this topic, before I even get to the actual point (please, I know you're here for the tangents), I would like to just let anyone and everyone know that I'm absolutely not interested in your "healthy substitutes" for things that taste good in their original form. I do not WANT a chocolate chip pancake made out of bananas and grains you harvested in your field this morning. If I want a banana I will eat one, and if I want a chocolate chip pancake I will eat one, and that's that. And DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT come @ me with "cashew cheese". Just don't. I don't even think I should honor that concept with an explanation of why it's so wrong. If that's not self-evident, I can't help you.
So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
At first I saw the pictures of this and thought, "YAY!!! Cinnamon rolls!" And then a couple of weeks ago, I actually tried making cinnamon rolls for the first time and realized that my inability to roll/shape/slice yeast doughs is still a thing. AND THEN I read this entire recipe and realized these get filled with raisins. So here we go!
ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand!
ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand!