Cosmic Purple Carrot Harvest

We've always planted a number of colorful vegetables - partly for the novelty, partly for the variety, and partly because we've always read that brightly colored vegetables are healthier for you.  Cosmic Purple Carrots are one of those vegetables that we harvested this weekend.  They were big and beautiful.  They probably could have been harvested a couple of weeks ago, but that's okay.  This basket was picked and put in a basket for a photo op from Mr. McGregor's garden before Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter found them.

We gave some of these to a friend at church and he thought that the carrots had crossed with my beets.  Nope, I told him.  That's just the natural color of this variety.

I pulled all the greens off and fed them to the animals waiting on the opposite side of the fence.  They were ecstatic.  The 'green-less' carrots went into a basket after washing the topsoil off of the roots, and we brought the HEAVY basket inside.

We started a big pot of water boiling.  Our goal was to cube and blanch about 3/4 of the basket and save the remaining 1/4 for eating and giving away.  The carrots are too big to chop in our chopper without first cutting into manageable chunks, so that's what I started doing.  That process exposes the big secret of Cosmic Purple Carrots:  They aren't purple through and through.  It's just the purple wrapper that is purple.  The interior is orange like any other 'normal' carrot.

Those chunks were put onto the rack of our handy chopper and POW!  The chunks are quickly transformed into little cubes.  Tricia wears ear plugs when chopping as it gets quite loud.

It doesn't take long.  In three shakes of a cottontail rabbit's tail, the first batch of carrots is cubed and ready to be blanched.  Each batch is put into boiling water.  When the water returns to a boil, we set the timer for 2 minutes.  When the timer goes off, we transfer the cubed carrots into a sink of ice water to stop the cooking process.

When the carrots have cooled, we load into quart-sized zip loc bags.  When complete, we had 10 quart bags full of carrots that will go in the freezer.

These are perfect for thawing out and steaming with fresh parsley, or putting on a baking pan and roasting or making a Cream of Carrot soup with some of LuLu's fresh milk.