Your Best Carrot Recipe

Six of the nine ingredients: onion, olive oil, ginger, thyme, carrots, and garlic. (Missing from the photo: vegetable stock, salt and pepper.)  

We cut our carrots into 1-inch rounds. If your carrots are fat like ours, you may want to slice them into 1/2-inch pieces to ensure they're nearly cooked through by the time the broiler works its magic.  

Amanda neatly arranges carrots on a baking sheet.  

They get tossed with a little olive oil and some salt.  

And then under the broiler!  

Smashin' garlic.  

We put the thyme and the ginger into the stock to infuse.  

After about 5 minutes under the broiler, our carrots looked like this. We flipped them and put them back in the oven.  

After about 15 minutes in the oven, our carrots looked like toasted orange marshmallows. We scraped off any spots that seemed especially charred but left most of the browning.  

Amanda browns the onions to start the base of the soup.  

Once they were soft and caramelized, she added the garlic.  

And we tipped in the roasted carrots.  

In goes the infused veggie stock -- sans ginger and thyme sprig.  

After a 5 minute simmer, we tried to blend the soup, but our fat carrot chunks proved too much for this immersion blender.  

So, we resorted to the trusty Waring.  

Much better!  

Time to taste!  

See how happy we are during this second batch of blending, fortified with spoonfuls of delicious soup?  

If your soup is too thick, just add some water or more broth and reheat gently before serving.  

To make the dish, you'll need: carrots (with their tops on), white wine vinegar, butter, Bibb lettuce, sugar, thyme and bay leaf.  

Since we weren't peeling the carrots, we needed to give them a good scrub.  

At thirschfeld's direction, we trimmed the carrot tops to about an inch long.  

We used a pan large enough to fit nearly all the carrots in one layer -- if you have a pan that's even a little wider, all the better.  

We scattered butter, thyme, bay leaf, sugar and vinegar over the top of the carrots.  

Then, a dash of salt and white pepper.  

Thirschfeld calls for enough water to come nearly all the way up the carrots, but because we had a few stacked on top of one another, we added just a cup and a half to start.  

The carrots simmered on the stove for about 20 minutes, until just tender. You can cook them less or more, depending on how you like your carrots.  

With the carrots tender, and the liquid nearly reduced to a glaze, Amanda added the lettuce leaves to the pan to wilt briefly.  

In seconds, they looked like leaves of light green spinach.  

We put the veggies on a platter and drizzled the rest of the glaze over them.