I'd never thought of making a carrot salad this way...
My friend Pervin taught me how to make this salad. I have made carrot salads many times, always using raw grated carrots but Pervin, who taught me how to make lots of delicious Turkish dishes, showed me how to make a salad which involves cooking the grated carrot first. It's soft and garlicky and the carrot flavour seems intensified by the cooking. I love it and have made it over and over again this summer.
What I love about it most is that there are so few ingredients, and they are the ones I usually have in my fridge most of the time.
Angelo, my angelic neighbour with the vegetable garden, hasn't had much luck growing carrots, unfortunately, so I buy mine from the tiny organic market - Bio Solequo Coop which pops up 5 mins from my house every Saturday.
Yoghurty Carrot Salad - The Recipe
Makes Enough for 4 as a side dish.
Takes About 40 minutes to make, including about 15/20 minutes cooling time.
The Ingredients
3 large or 4 medium carrots
3 large tablespoons of Greek yoghurt*
1 clove garlic - crushed or grated into a paste
Parsley and or mint
A little olive oil**
Salt and pepper as usual, to taste.
* I always use full-fat dairy products. Mostly because they taste so good and they are less processed and also because I once found out that some of the vitamins in milk (A, D E and K) are fat soluble, so less fat means fewer vitamins. It just makes sense to me to use dairy products that have undergone just the processing they need and no more. Removing the fat from milk doesn't make a better, tastier or more nutritious product. Add to that the fact that reducing fat doesn't necessarily confer the health benefits we've been led to believe and I can't see any good reason to use anything other than the whole, unadulterated fat-as-it-comes version.
** I use cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil for all my cooking - and I'm incredibly lucky to have olive trees on the land from which we make our own olive oil.
The Making
Step 1
Peel or scrub your carrots and then grate them with a coarse grater.
Step 2
Heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a largish frying pan. Add the carrots, season them with salt and pepper and cook them on a medium heat until they are just tender. Add a couple of tablespoons of water to keep them moist. You don't want them to colour just to become nice and soft and tender. Stir them around often. This should take about 10 mins.
Step 3
While the carrots are cooking put 3 or 4 large tablespoons of yoghurt into a bowl. Add a small clove of garlic (how much garlic you use is really down to personal taste).
Step 4
Chop some parsley or mint or both. Mint is my addition, I quite like the added flavour. Or you can stay traditional and just use parsley.
Step 5
When the carrots are cooked, transfer them to a wide dish so that they can cool down.
Step 6
When the carrots are cool, mix them with the garlicky yoghurt and the herbs and check the seasoning.
Step 7
Arrange in the serving dish and sprinkle a little parsley or mint on top.
This salad can be made a day or so ahead of time and keeps well in the fridge. If you do keep it in the fridge, I would take it out an hour or so before you eat so it;'s not fridge cold but room temperature.
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