PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARK LOADER | STYLING BY LEAH HOLZEL
These two spring vegetables, often tossed together in a frozen pack, should be celebrated. Fresh peas and carrots are both wonderful on their own, adapting to many flavors, but together they rock. While fresh peas are a short-lived, prized garden vegetable, carrots have a much longer season and are found at farmers markets and supermarket produce counters year round. But fresh and locally grown carrots will always be sweeter and more flavorful.
Peas are cool-season crops. Their season is fairly short, and as a gardener, I look forward to it greedily. Often green peas are scarfed down by the person picking them and might never get to the kitchen. Gardener’s treat! Peas are simply wonderful tossed raw in a salad, added to any soup, vegetable, or grain dish, or prepared in the French manner: lightly braised in butter with lettuce, fresh thyme, and a tiny pinch of sugar.
Carrots also are cool-season vegetables. Unlike peas, they’re a root vegetable and can remain in the ground for a time. Originally carrots were purple, not the bright sunny orange we know today. It’s thought that Dutch botanists bred them to the familiar orange. Happily, these days, we can buy or grow carrots in a rainbow of colors: purple, purple with an orange core, watermelon red, creamy white, canary yellow—and orange. Carrots are a staple of the kitchen. They’re wonderful nibbled raw, grated, or shaved into thin ribbons for salads, in all manner of soups, stews, and vegetable medleys, and of course, glazed stove top and oven-roasted.
When purchasing, choose peas that have been freshly picked and don’t overcook them. Old peas are starchy, overcooked peas are hard and gritty. Carrots can take more abuse, which is why they’re so delicious with a bit of char when roasted.
Carrots and peas are good companions both in the kitchen and in the garden. And both of them are planted just as soon as the soil can be worked. They’re a perfect match.
