Vegetables - Carrot Ring and Creamed Peas

Vegetables.  I like vegetables... mostly.  Cauliflower, rutabegas, and raddishes, I can do without.  But generally, vegetables are great.  One of my favorite things to do here in St. Paul is to go to the farmers' market in Lowertown on the weekends.  Toward the end of summer and early fall, tables are heaped with peppers, squash, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, greens, and so much more.  One of the things that make it so great too is that it seems like everybody is smiling.  How could one not be happy when surrounded by so much great produce and delicious food is on everybody's mind?  Oh farmers' market.  I will miss you through the winter months.

So I was looking forward to the vegetables section of the cook book.  After a run of mediocre to anxiety-producing dishes, we were due for something good.  How wrong I was.  I can say definitively that we hit a frightening new low this time around.  See the face below?  It is not one of joy and merriment, celebrating a culinary delight.

How could someone do that to such nice innocent vegetables?

Sarah looked at the Vegetables section before I did and was drawn to the first recipe.  Carrots, salt, pepper, onion, egg, milk.  We had all these things on hand and it was the first recipe.  Of course we would make a carrot ring.  Why not?  Unfortunately, I didn't look very closely at the recipe, but saw that the ring could be filled with creamed peas.  Luckily for us, there was a recipe for creamed peas right below the carrot ring.  Perfect!  I love creamed peas.  The devil is in the details though, and these weren't pleasant details.

Carrot Ring Preparation

Like many of the other recipes I've made so far, this is a fairly simple dish to prepare.  It wouldn't take a ton of prep, and the creamed peas could be made while the ring was in the oven.  But I am getting ahead of myself.  Here are our recipes:

A two-fer here.  Carrot ring and creamed peas go together like peas and carrots, and then should go right on out the door and not come back.

When Sarah mentioned this recipe, I envisioned carrots cut, cooked to crisp-tender, and arranged in a ring.  How wrong I was.  We're making carrot custard.  I like custard.  In fact, I might go so far as to say that I love custard.  Carrot custard though?  Well, if that's what we're doing, that's what we're doing.  So we need to start out with the carrots.  We had some great, sweet carrots from the farmers' market.  James really likes the purple ones, and since that would make the color a little off, I decided to leave out the purple ones and use only the orange and yellow carrots.

Yum!

First things first, I peeled, chopped, and steamed the carrots.  My suspicion is that sixty years ago they would have been boiled, but since I don't have specific directions, I went with steaming.  Let's keep as many of the nutrients in those carrots as we can.  The trick was then to mash them so they'd be nice and smooth.  First the potato masher to get it started, followed by the hand mixer.  It was still pretty lumpy though.

Really loud, and not smooth enough.

Nobody wants lumpy custard, so it was on to the food processor.

Much better

The only other prep I needed to do was to add a whole two teaspoons of minced onion.  I almost couldn't cut a small enough piece of onion.  I am so used to loading up my food with onion, mincing such a small amount felt kind of strange.

I love you Wusthof knife.  I love you forever.  Seems a shame I don't have more for you to cut up.

Then it is simply a matter of mixing everything up and putting it into the bundt cake mold.

Yummy?

Our metal 9x13 pan was just barely big enough to be used for the water bath.

Into the oven it goes.  I love me some custard, so at this point, I am looking forward to the result.

Creamed Peas Preparation

My grandmother and grandfather had a pretty good-sized garden for many years.  I helped plant seeds a few times, and more than a few times I helped shell peas, pick potatoes, or shuck corn.  Though it was quite a while ago, my impression is that they had a pretty successful garden.  Some day I aspire to have a garden like theirs.  One of their vegetables I liked the most were their peas.  they would harvest so many that they would freeze what they didn't eat right away and have fresh garden peas through much of the winter.  When I would go to visit, my grandmother would ask me what I wanted to have for dinner.  Invariably, I'd ask for creamed peas, mashed potatoes, and gravy.  My favorite way to eat this was to mix it all together.  Her mashed potatoes were smooth and creamy.  Her gravy was perfect.  Even the thought of her creamed peas brings a smile to my face.  So making creamed peas to go with a carrot custard seemed like a sure thing.

Just one problem:

The color of the peas in the can doesn't remotely match the color of the peas on the side of the can.

An open letter to canned peas:

Dear canned peas,

We were pretty familiar with one another when I was young.  I ate you.  Our relationship was something that I took for granted.  In the years since I left home, we've not seen much of one another, and we've grown distant.  I'm afraid that I've met someone newer and fresher.  Please don't take this personally, but I really need to move on.  It was *cough cough* nice to see you again, but it is time that we went our separate ways.

Not completely regretfully,

Aaron

So we've got canned peas.  Terrific-ish.  But we're sticking to the recipe here at Cook Book Time Machine, so canned peas it is.  Aside from the peas, the rest of the recipe was pretty solid.  I made a roux, and then added milk (I would have preferred half and half, perhaps, but this was alright).

Roux!

After mixing in the milk, salt, and pepper, all I had to do was to stir in the peas.  I can't help but think that the recipe called for a larger can of peas than what I bought though as there was quite a bit more cream sauce than was necessary.

Time to put everything together.  The timer on the oven went off, and the custard looked to be set.  All that needed to happen now was to remove the custard from the bundt pan and add the peas.

A delicate operation

It worked!  It flattened, but it worked.  Carrot ring!

Lastly, all that needed to happen was to add the creamed peas.  Bonus for us was the option to add some parsley for taste.

It's really something, isn't it?

Tasting and Reaction

Here is where the business of my life lately will really show.  It was over a week ago that I made the carrot ring.  I didn't write anything down for reactions, and what was expressed is long gone from my memory.  I do have one hopeful looking picture though.

The moment before despair sets in.

Not at all what I had hoped for.

Sarah was pretty disgusted from the start when she saw what came out of the bundt pan and I think only took a grudging bite.  James refused to try it at all.  First, the texture.  It is custardy, to be sure, but the texture is a little short of pleasing.  It's not chunky at all, but it is also not smooth like a custard should be.  Then there is the two teaspoons of onion.  Instead of a mince, the onion should probably have been shredded like what I did to get the onion juice for the stuffed cucumber.  As it was, you'd occasionally get a little disconcerting crunch when you're expecting mush.  And that is what the custard was.  It was mush.

Flavor-wise, two things stood out:  carrot and egg.  The carrot flavor wasn't bad at all.  However, the egginess of the custard was a bit much.  A plain custard is of course a little eggy, but even though that plain custard only has eggs, milk, and maybe some salt and nutmeg, you don't think eggs.  It is more about the creamy flavor and delightful texture.  The carrot ring had neither of those.

Creamed peas.  With canned peas, it will be impossible to stand up to my expectations.  The cream sauce for the peas was alright.  As I mentioned earlier, I would have liked some half and half in there instead of skim milk, but that is a minor quibble, really.  The dull green peas were almost exactly what I didn't want in that cream sauce.  Had the peas been fresh, or even frozen the creamed peas would have been genuinely good.  The way things stood though, the best part of the creamed peas was the little bit of fresh parsley on top.

Eaten together in the same bite didn't really help.  The flavor of the peas was masked by the eggy custard, and the texture of peas in a not-quite-smooth custard wasn't an improvement either.

The best thing I can say about this dish was that it was the perfect thing for me to eat after I had to have a tooth pulled the next day.

Mrs. Gust Haugen, you're cabbage rolls were an okay starting point but generally failed to please, and you completely swung and missed here I'm afraid to say.  I have confidence that the next recipe of yours I come across will be much better.  Nowhere to go but up, right?