{"id":687,"date":"2010-11-20T07:47:00","date_gmt":"2010-11-20T07:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elitemporaryblog.wordpress.com\/2010\/11\/20\/she-got-out-a-skillet"},"modified":"2016-01-07T18:30:07","modified_gmt":"2016-01-07T23:30:07","slug":"she-got-out-a-skillet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orangette.net\/2010\/11\/she-got-out-a-skillet\/","title":{"rendered":"She got out a skillet"},"content":{"rendered":"

I should begin with a confession: I\u2019m not in Thanksgiving mode yet. Who knows. It\u2019s weird. This holiday sort of sneaks up, I\u2019ve noticed, and then it\u2019s quickly eclipsed by Christmas, which is sad, since Thanksgiving is our only national holiday devoted wholly to eating. This year, we\u2019re heading to New Jersey to visit family, and I will almost certainly make cranberry chutney<\/a> and probably a chocolate pecan pie, but it\u2019s been hard to plan from a distance. Thanksgiving of 2010, I apologize. I\u2019ll do better next year.<\/p>\n

On the upside, I ate almost two pounds of carrots today.<\/p>\n

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I\u2019m not sure why, but I keep thinking about my host mother<\/a>. I haven\u2019t seen her for ten years, but still, I think of her often, and when I\u2019m not thinking of her leeks vinaigrette, I\u2019m thinking of her carrots cooked in a skillet with onion and thyme. Corentine always cooked vegetables on the stovetop. It hadn\u2019t occurred to me how accustomed I was to oven-roasting everything – broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, Brussels sprouts, rutabagas, carrots, everything<\/i> – until I noticed that she only used the oven for cakes and tarts and the occasional quiche. When she wanted to cook a vegetable, she got out a skillet and warmed some oil in it, or she got out a saucepan and the steamer basket. I didn\u2019t think much about it at the time, and when I cooked for myself in her kitchen, I continued to roast as usual – using the drip pan of her broiler pan, since she didn\u2019t seem to have a baking sheet. But when I came home, when I no longer had the luxury of sitting at her table each night, I missed her vegetables, and in particular, those carrots.<\/p>\n

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I don\u2019t think of this as a holiday dish, so it feels a little misleading to write about it only a few days before Thanksgiving. It\u2019s not that it isn\u2019t worthy of a holiday table; it\u2019s just that, for Corentine, this was bare-bones, stupid-easy, everyday eating. She would serve these carrots next to a piece of fish, with a slice of quiche, or a roasted chicken that she picked up at the market. It\u2019s what you make when you\u2019ve got too many carrots in the crisper drawer and you need something for dinner. But it\u2019s also the kind of food that, to me, is synonymous with French home cooking: simple and inexpensive, but also nuanced, a little elegant.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to call these sauteed carrots<\/i>, because those two words usually point toward a cloying end, likely tossed with salted butter and honey, so mushy that no actual chewing is required. When I talk about Corentine\u2019s carrots, I call them skillet carrots<\/i>, because it sounds nicer, and also because the skillet and its lid are the key elements here. These are not sauteed carrots: they\u2019re sort of sauteed, sort of steamed, and sort of stewed. I watched Corentine cook carrots this way a number of times, and though I now can\u2019t remember whether she used olive oil or safflower oil (her usual go-to), the basic gist is this. You warm a nice amount of oil in a large skillet, and then you soften sliced onions in it. Then you add sliced garlic, and a few minutes later, you add a lot of sliced carrots and some sprigs of fresh thyme and maybe a little more oil, and then you cover the pan with a lid and let things roll along until the carrots are tender. But that doesn\u2019t quite capture it: what\u2019s really happening under the lid, where you can\u2019t see, is that the carrots and onions are mingling, stewing together, spending quality time, so that in the end, the onions are nearly caramelized and the carrots are almost rich, sticky with the onions\u2019 natural sugars.<\/p>\n

Corentine served the dish just like that, and you can, too, but I like to add a small amount of red wine vinegar at the very end, a subtle dose of acidity, enough to gently perk up the earthbound flavor of the carrots without adding any flavor of its own. Last night I ate these carrots with a couple of fried eggs and let the yolks scurry around and sauce them, which I highly recommend. Today I\u2019m a little under the weather, so I ate them on their own tonight, two heaping plates\u2019 worth, and I highly recommend that, too.<\/p>\n

Happy Thanksgiving.<\/p>\n\n

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Recipe<\/div>\n

Skillet Carrots with Onions and Thyme<\/h2>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n
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