Over the rainbow carrots

Vegan wild rice and rainbow carrot bowls with coriander salsa

Ingredients

Rainbow Carrot Bowls

150g wild rice (I used a mix of wild and brown rice)
4-5 carrots, ideally in different colours if you can find them
1 parsnip
Medium-sized radicchio (or other sturdy lettuce like little gem)
bunch fresh or dried thyme
1 T honey (or maple syrup or other sweeteners for vegans)
2 T coriander seeds
1/2 t crushed chilli flakes
Salt and pepper to taste
Optional: pistachio nuts or toasted and chopped almonds, dried cranberries (preferably sweetened with apple juice).

Coriander salsa

20 g coriander (around 1/4 of a bunch), keep aside a few prime leaves for garnishing
45 g tahini
1 clove garlic crushed or grated with a microplane
Juice of 1/2 a lemon
2 T tamarind pulp or 1 T paste
Enough water to allow it to blend smoothly
Pepper & salt to taste

Serves: two adults for a light dinner.

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven grill, to 180°C (350°F).

2. Cook your wild rice. Measure out 150g of wild rice and rinse briefly before placing in an instant pot or pressure cooker. Cover with a little under double the water. Cook for 20 minutes then leave in pot to steam for a further 10 minutes. Remove and fluff up grains with a fork and leave to cool slightly before using. I found this guide to be helpful and it offers some alternative methods to cooking wild rice.

3. Prepare tamarind pulp, which I recommend using instead of paste if it is available. Boil kettle. Pour approx 50 ml water over the tamarind pulp and leave to sit. Strain through a sieve when ready to use. Discard the remaining stones.

4. While the wild rice is steaming away, slice up carrots and parsnip into 1 cm thick, angled slices and arrange on a tray lined with baking paper.

5. Prepare spice mix. Grind coriander seeds, thyme and around half a teaspoon of crushed chilli flakes, with salt and pepper in a mortar and pestle. The mix can have some texture still, but you want to avoid whole coriander seeds. Since these will be roasted in the oven there is no need to toast the seeds first. I highly recommend grinding your own coriander seeds rather than using ground coriander, as the latter tends to lose its flavour very quickly in the cupboard.

6. Sprinkle the spice mix onto the vegetables, coating on both sides.

7. Drizzle a tablespoon of honey and some nice olive oil over the veggies.

8. Grill the vegetables. Pop directly under the oven grill (broiler) for five minutes. Check and turn and then leave to cook for a further five minutes, or until cooked to your liking and depending on how powerful your oven is. You can then turn off the grill and leave the veggies in the oven so they stay warm until ready to serve.

9. While the veggies are cooking, make your coriander salsa. Rinse the coriander. Add all ingredients into the small pot of a blender and blend until the sauce is bright green and smooth and creamy. A quick note on tamarind. It has an excellent tangy, sour flavour with an edge of sweetness. I originally made the coriander salsa without it, but I found it to be a bit bitter. If you can’t find tamarind, then substitute a squeeze of extra lemon juice and a touch of honey or maple syrup for a hint of sweetness that speaks to the sweet vegetables. You may need to add a dash of extra cold water to get the blender going.

10. If using, add chopped cranberries into the warm wild rice so they soak up a little of the moisture before serving. Pour over some oil and a touch of balsamic reduction or lemon juice. Season lightly, remembering that most of the flavour will come from the sauce and the veggies.

11. Prepare your radicchio bowls. Take a whole radicchio and gently peel off each leaf one at a time. You will need at least four. The best way I found was to roll each layer of radicchio back onto itself, into something that looked like a rolled up tobacco leaf. It can help to slice around the root with a sharp knife so that the leaf releases cleanly. Once off, you can roll it back out into its its natural curve. This takes time and patience. It is akin to peeling the foil off an easter egg without ripping it. But you will be rewarded with satisfyingly intact radicchio leaves. They make perfect bowls for your creation.

12. Assemble bowls. Start with a smear of coriander salsa, then layer in wild rice and rainbow carrots and parsnip until full. Take care not to rip the radicchio leaf as you go. The rice and vegetables should still be warm. Top with a further spoonful of coriander salsa, a few coriander leaves and pistachio or almond nuts if using. Serve immediately. Eet smakelijk.

13. Drink recommendation: If you want to continue the carrot theme and you have a juicer, try juicing some of the orange and red carrots into a delicious carrot juice, along with an apple, half a lime or lemon, a knob of ginger root and fresh curcuma if you have it. We served this half-and-half with sparkling water as a carrotiser and it was delicious. Just be careful pouring in the water as it tends to bubble over, much like my excitement to be launching this first recipe into the world.

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The story behind the recipe

If you are still reading, thank you! One of my pet hates about food blogs, aside from the ads, is that you have to scroll a long way to get to the recipe. So I’m experimenting with giving the recipe before the burbling blurb. What do you think?

To be quite honest, this is not the recipe I intended to inaugurate this newsletter with. In all of my brainstorming and sketching and dreaming about what this newsletter would be, I had a clear picture of the first recipe. Something perfectly colourful and bright, as an antidote to the dark Dutch winter days, made with golden beetroots. Then I forgot to put my order in with our local greengrocer. And when I went to our local organic store, there were no golden beets to be had. I could not find them anywhere. Red beets, yes, but I didn’t want borscht, I wanted liquid sunshine.

Perhaps, like me, you have found yourself wandering aimlessly around a market or store unable to find the key ingredient for the dish you have planned to make. You find yourself getting increasingly annoyed. You begin to wonder whether you should abandon the whole enterprise. Your inner critic goes into overdrive. Then you pause. You breathe. You look around at the vegetables they do have. You start to improvise. There are beautiful carrots in hues of purples and reds, whites and yellows as well as a pale orange you have never seen before. The humble carrot dressed up in Joseph’s coat, in varieties that were common before The Netherlands popularised the orange carrot. There are long, knobbly parsnip and Italian radicchio. There is a huge bunch of coriander. So you buy them, along with three types of grains. You go home and you start cooking in the kitchen. Before you put out a board and start chopping you have no idea what you are going to make. You are just creating. And you make something you’ve never cooked before, inspired by the memory of a tray of caramelized honey carrots your partner once made in the tiny Paris apartment for one of your dearest friends on a cold, windy night. Another memory of a long-ago thanksgiving in New York when you volunteered to bring a salad and ended up finding an amazing recipe for wild rice salad from the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian with dried cranberries. Then the entire afternoon has gone by in a flash and that deep Dutch darkness has already taken hold by the time you come to take photographs. You and said partner take turns holding a floor lamp on an angle and photographing the food. In the end, the first post may not be what you imagined and the photographs are still a work in progress, but it is good enough. You’re not aiming for perfection any more. Somewhere, buried in all of that, there must be a lesson for the new year. A lesson to breathe and follow your creative juices wherever they flow, rather than always planning and pushing.

Enjoy cooking. Any feedback, thoughts or reactions so welcome. Next week, the promised golden beets.

Peace and love.

Amelia