Recipe: Diane Morgan’s Baby Carrots with Dill

When we decided to devote a week to carrots during our month of Glorious Vegetables, I went hunting for just one pure and perfect carrot recipe. We’ve given you crazy salad and fermented pickles, and there are other fresh ways to eat carrots coming up. But, in the end, the freshest of baby carrots deserve to be eaten in the simplest of ways, and Diane Morgan’s easy recipe is the way to go.

Diane Morgan is a cookbook author who lives in Portland, Oregon, and her recent book Roots is one of my favorite vegetable-devoted books. It seizes hold of all those knobbly, colorful, often under-loved root vegetables and lays them out in all sorts of interesting and delicious ways.

In this recipe from the book she takes one of the most appealing roots, baby carrots, and braises them quickly with fresh dill — a perfect pairing. And so easy — you don’t even need to peel them. Diane says, “Freshly dug baby carrots, with their bushy green tops, are naturally sweet. Just give them a good scrub with a vegetable brush and skip peeling them. Keep a bit of the green stem attached to give the finished dish a pretty, rustic look. It’s easy enough for a weeknight meal, yet special enough for a dinner party.”

When buying carrots for this recipe, don’t buy packaged baby carrots, which are really whittled-down full-sized carrots. Instead buy young, small carrots with the beautiful tops still attached, which are really sweet and have such thin skins that you don’t even have to peel them!

This recipe braises and glazes the carrots in butter, chicken stock, and vinegar, and the hit of fresh dill at the ends adds some vibrant green color and bright, herby flavor.

– Christine, June 2015