Eat Every Carrot and Pea on Your Plate

Author Notes

Carrots and peas are kind of a 1950's cliche--right? I mean, who hasn't seen packages of frozen carrots--hard orange square chunks--paired with peas--the big green starchy ones. If your family is like mine, this was considered healthy food when you were growing up. "Eat every carrot and pea on your plate," my Granny said. And that would just crack us up.

Peas and carrots look pretty together and don't have to be the flavorless starchy bombs of our youth. This recipe calls for frozen peas because it's still winter here, but would be great with fresh very sweet peas. You can get organic carrots in just about any grocery store--you want them to be as fresh and sweet as possible. I like using the very thin carrots because I'm not up for cutting carrots into little cubes (and anyway the thin ones are sweeter). You want the pieces to be small, so you may have to cut the top ends in half lengthwise before slicing.

You can defrost the peas in the microwave or in a bowl of water. You want them to be room temperature and fairly dry when you add them to the saute pan, or they will add a lot of water and you'll lose the butteriness of the dish.

You can lighten this up by using half butter and half chicken broth.

This is a great side dish for roast chicken or broiled fish. Finished with a little extra butter and some parmesan cheese, it could be a vegetarian main dish if you served it with brown rice. —drbabs