Carrots For Days

Normally, we're harvesting the fall crop of carrots in February.  Our very cold weather delayed everything.  In fact, I thought it had killed our carrots.  I even planted two rows of spring carrots, which I never do, as I thought all hope was lost.  But alas!  The fall carrots rebounded and we had a reduced, but still sufficient harvest.

On a recent trip to where she grew up in Corpus Christi, my wife returned with a big basket that my mother-in-law had given her.  It works out nicely for harvesting.  We have a nice haul of Danvers carrots.  They're our 'normal' orange variety.

Then I picked the other two rows of the other varieties of carrots we have planted.  We fed the carrot tops to the animals by the fence watching our every move.

Here is a better look at the varieties after they're all washed up.  On the left, we have the Cosmic Purple Carrot.  It is purple on the outside with an orange flesh.  The one in the middle is your regular run of the mill Danvers carrot.  The one on the right is my favorite.  It is the Atomic Red Carrot.  It has a beautiful red color all the way through.

We eat a bunch of them, mainly oven roasted with olive oil and salt and pepper topped with some fresh parsley.  But we preserve a bunch, too.  We will can some of them.  We dice them up with a food chopper and then blanch them and bring them to a cool temperature in ice water.

We bag up a lot of quart bags of carrots.  These work perfectly for a quick meal as a side dish or, our new favorite, Cream of Carrot soup.  Into the freezer they go until we're ready.

We are trying a new experiment this year in dehydrating some carrots.  We'll do a couple of trays to see how they come out.

This is the same tray as above after drying.  Wow, they kind of went away, didn't they?

We'll put them in a jar like this.  When we were finished, we had a pint full of dehydrated carrots.

Tricia is thinking that when we don't have fresh carrots, she can throw a couple of tablespoons into stews where they'll rehydrate.  We'll know how this experiment turns out and whether or not this is something we will continue to do as another option to preserve the harvest.