Sweet Dinner Carrots

It's time for another installment of cheap food recipes! Yay!

One of my most expensive purchases at the grocery store is always fresh produce. Good produce costs good money, generally, and while there is the option of buy in bulk to reduce pennies per pound, is anyone really capable of eating thirty pounds of anything fresh before they go bad? In order to avoid this needful waste, I go to my old faithful tactic of buying cheap and freezing extra.

Frozen Carrots--I like to freeze mine in the usual amounts of how much I cook for dinner. That way, I don't have to thaw out 5 pounds of carrots to boil up maybe half a pound, and refreeze the rest. Freezing in useable portions is a huge timesaver.

For carrots, the appropriate way to freeze is after blanching. Basically, you take your carrots and boil them for a few minutes prior to freezing to partially cook them so that the water content is better preserved. I do this stove top because several attempts in the microwave yielded dry portions of carrot. Freezing them fresh (i.e., without the blanching step) will result in mushy carrots when you go to thaw.

In order to make tasty dinner carrots, I use some of my frozen stock. I put them into enough water to cover for boiling and about 1 cup of brown suger in a pot. I bring them to a boil for about 5 minutes, then serve the carrots (minus most of the water). Butter to taste; these carrots can be refrozen for up to 1 month. When refreezing, I recommend freezing the carrots undrained in the cooking brown sugar water, as this allows you to heat up the whole deal with having to add more water (reheating the carrots without a water buffer can result in dried out carrots).

Enjoy!

Alula