French Carrot Salad

I returned from my stint on the farm in Ariege with pages and pages full of recipe ideas and inspiration. I should be amply occupied for the rest of the summer as I begin to recreate and experiment with the lessons that I learned in that sweet place. I decided to begin my exploration of the recipes with an unassuming dish that somehow became one of my favorites.

Each day on the farm began at 7 am, when we collected black and white striped critters that crawled on the potato plants, and gave each tomato plant a good shake to release the pollen from the inner compartments of the flowers [at least I think that’s what we were doing; the explanations for our tasks were, admittedly, sometimes lost in translation]. Depending on the weather we later moved on to weeding carrot or onion fields, sewing seeds in the greenhouse, planting fields of zucchini or parsley or some other crop, or performing some other task. By the time twelve o’clock came around, I was usually pretty well coated in mud and exhausted from struggling to maintain my balance as I trudged through the soggy rows of vegetable plants. Thus, the invitation to go help prepare the afternoon’s lunch was always a welcome request. Pretty much every day before we went up to the kitchen we visited a greenhouse to pick a sizable bunch of carrots and then a tangential greenhouse to pick five heads of lettuce. With our newly picked bounty we walked (or sometimes rode in the car, always followed closely by the farm dog, Yushka) to the house. There, we met Heloise, the farmer’s wife and an exceptional cook, who had usually already commenced the meal preparations. We went straight to work washing or chopping vegetables (always a daunting task as cutting boards did not exist on the farm, and all chopping was done in the knife-to-thumb fashion) or making “sauce du sesame” or setting the table. One task, almost always completed by Jeremie, the intern, was “rapper les carottes,” which involved attaching a drill to a rotating grater in order to shred copious amounts of carrots. The product, a giant casserole pot of raw carrot shreds, was then placed on the table and enjoyed with a special sesame sauce at the beginning of almost every meal. Upon my first encounter with the salad, I thought it must be a quirky raw foodie concoction, but I later noticed that it was served in many traditional French gatherings and even available ready made in some grocery stores. I also grew unusually fond of the remarkably plain salad, and missed it greatly upon leaving the farm.

tree house kitchen

I prepared this salad during the first couple of hours that I spent back in my home. Shortly after returning to my home kitchen, however, I went with my parents to visit my brother. We stayed in a little tree house complete with a kitchen. It was sweet to get to hang out with my brother and share the first of many french recipes with my family.

The recipe:

Makes enough carrots for the neighborhood

Ingredients: 

Four bunches of carrots

Sesame paste (or tahini, if you can’t find paste)

Olive oil (or sunflower oil)

Herbed sea salt (or just salt)

Instructions:

Wash and grate the carrots. You can grate them using a food processor (or just a hand grater but put on an audiobook or something if you try that because it will probably take a substantial portion of the day).

Mix two parts sesame paste with one part oil.

Scoop the carrots onto plates and dress as desired with the sauce and salt.