Apple Carrot Amaranth Bake

You may remember the mention I made in my post Then and Now: My Art Opening Night of the raw carrots and apple slices I had asked for as part of the food to nosh on while mingling and looking at the art. After the reception was over and we were packing everything up, Sandi asked me if I’d like to take what apples and carrots were left home with me. Of course I said yes.

The carrots were the “baby” ones–organic, but peeled and shaved down to a munchie size, with no skin. Honestly, this isn’t my favorite way to eat raw carrots. I’m such a vegetable nerd that pretty much every day I do a good imitation of Bugs Bunny: I love to just take a whole carrot out of the frig and bite into its unpeeled whole goodness. I get the earthy taste of the vitamins in the skin, and I guess that also means I’m not slicing it in a way to lessen the nutrients. (I’m not cooking it either, which in some circles is the only way to enhance some of the carrot’s nutrients, but I’m getting a good amount of vitamin C, and what I call a cheerful shot in the arm on a gloomy winter day. And I get to crunch, which I love to do.) In fact I love to eat carrots this way so much that I regularly buy the 5 lb bags of organic ones meant for juicing, only I just chomp on them one at a time. Sometimes I eat 3 or 4 a day, but almost always I have at least one.

All this to say that I wasn’t particularly thrilled to eat these carrots raw day after day. So I decided to come up with something easy that would combine both the carrots and the apples, before I ate all the apples, and didn’t know what to do with the carrots.

Since the apples were already sliced and I had sprinkled a little lemon juice into the bag they were in, they were basically ready for anything I wanted to do with them. Being the lazy cook I am these days who would rather draw or paint than make a complicated recipe, I hoped the shaved little mini carrots would not need to be made smaller or thinner. But just for good measure, I sliced the larger ones in half, so they might have a chance of catching up in cooking time with the apples.

This dish is more of an opportunity than a recipe. But it was so sweet and good and  unusual that I’ll do my best to write it up in recipe form so you can try it out if you like. It reminds me of a name one of my friends gave herself years ago as we were all sitting around eating vegetarian food at a women’s gathering potluck. Some were saying whether they were vegetarian all the time, or if they ate meat sometimes. She piped up brightly with the exclamation that she was an “opportunivore” and we all laughed.

It’s hard to be an “opportunivore” when you can’t have meat, dairy, added oil, soy, gluten, or any number of things (like processed sugar) that don’t work for your particular digestive system, or are off the plate for ethical reasons. So I was especially pleased when I saw this “opportunity” and that it was easy and fun. And just to be sure, I plied my neighbor Ashley with some before posting it here. She gave it the thumbs up and said I should post it. How can I refuse a face as sweet as this one?

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Even after all this, I still had some of those baby carrots left over. In my next post I’ll share a “vegan version” of what I did with them.

And here’s just one more shot of the whole wall at the art opening, which I forgot to put into the last post:

Bon Appetit!