Carrot Gnocchi

      Gnocchi has always been one of my favorite dishes, the little bit of chewy and the versatility and variety of sauces made me excited to eat it. I used the Potato Gnocchi with Pesto recipe from the Williams-Sonoma web site.www.williams-sonoma.com Instead of using all the potatoes, I replace ¾ of the potatoes with carrots. I left some of the potatoes for the starch. The sauce that I use to top it with I just came up on the fly, it is just butter, sage, heavy cream and Parmesan cheese. I did not want to have a sauce that totally over powered the uniqueness of the gnocchi. The recipe is remarkably easy to follow. I can see this as a dessert recipe. I made this recipe savory. The carrot gnocchi has a delightfully smooth texture and the potato and the carrot play well off each other. Neither is dominating, and both makes an appearance leaving a feeling of wanting more and more. Which is fine of course, because are super nutritious.

I did the history of carrots the last time and I thought it would be fun to have some quirky facts about carrots. I got most of these facts from the Carrot Museum.www.carrotmuseum.co.uk

The voice of Bugs Bunny, Mel Blanc actually didn’t like carrots.

So how was the Carrot used as an aphrodisiac? Well, men in Teheran in the late nineteenth century stewed carrots with sugar to increase the quality and quantity of sperm.  

Carrot Vodka? Carrots produce more distilled spirits than potatoes.

Carrots as a conceptive? In India women eat carrots seeds to prevent getting pregnant.

The Calming effect of Carrots? Romans conquerors fed carrot broth to female captives to loosen them up.

These are just a few facts, there of course thousands more and I encourage you to look them up and have fun with the carrot! I use a lot of my recipes from Williams-Sonoma, here is the web site, www.williams-sonoma.com, Please be my guest and take a look. 

Carrot Cupcakes

Where did carrots come from? Asia, America, or Africa?  Would you believe that they came from the Middle East?  Carrots were first mentioned about 5000 years ago in Afghanistan.  Traders took the seeds of the carrots and spread them through their trade routes, and as many of the cultures embraced the carrots.  Even in ancient times carrots were considered an aphrodisiac, even though they were used more for medicinal uses that as a food staple. 

Carrots of ancient times were not the carrots that we know and love today.  They ranged in color from purple, white, black, red, and yellow.  It was during the Middle Ages that the red and yellow carrots were cross bred to make the sweet and delicious orange carrot.

Carrot cake is one of those desserts that show the versatility of the carrot.  If you type in carrot cake into the search engine, hundreds of different recipes will show up.  I personally love my carrot cake without raisins and nuts, but some of my friends don’t consider it a carrot cake with these two additions.   The recipe that I used was the Classic Carrot Cake from the Williams-Sonoma web site. (Williams-sonoma.com). It has a lovely spiced scent that is alluring, and the color, though it’s not bright orange, is rustic and warm.  The cake itself is super moist with a delicate balance of the spices and carrots. I added ginger to it because I love the dynamic of carrots and ginger, and to show that carrot and ginger can be a dessert too.  The cream cheese icing adds a bit of bite to the dynamic of the flavors.  Carrot cake can be used as an aphrodisiac because it ignites all of the senses with warm and inviting colors and smells. Cinnamon is the most prominent smell, and then you can just smell the carrot in the back ground.  Having both of the smells together does get me excited to cut into a piece of carrot cake.

I encourage those that read this blog to try out the recipes and to come up with your own ideas and let me know how it goes.

Just a note: I got the information about the history of the carrot from www.indepthinfo.com  So got check it out and see what you come up with.