Baby Carrots

Whenever we hear the adjective "baby" applied to anything like carrots, or other foods, or woolen things, we have to suppress a giggle or two. You see, almost 20 years ago we were in Peru for a long trip. During that time, vendors would always try to entice us to buy things. They would say, "Alpaca...baby alpaca," hoping we would be fooled into buying their machine-made woven or knitted goods which didn't have much or any alpaca wool in them, baby or otherwise. We learned quickly to identify the quality goods from the rest and did come back with many nice things (see photo, hands down the nicest hand woven blanket we saw), but navigating the street vendors was always a challenge. It did get easier as our Spanish got better although nothing could mask our appearance as tourists. You can understand why labeling something as "baby" automatically raises a red flag for us.

Baby carrots in the grocery store are, for the most part, not young carrots at all but larger carrots cut to look small. Not so with the farm share! Tuesday's pick up included two pounds of carrots and I made a point of finding the smallest ones I could get out of the bin. When each carrot weighs maybe half an ounce it took a while.

Today I set about making pickled carrots (Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, page 312) and I peeled each and every one of those little carrots. I even left their little stem end on, so they look like the ones you sometimes get in fancy restaurants. These are truly baby carrots and they make me happy just to look at them! I plan to enter them in the fair, and it's cutting it pretty close in terms of them have enough time in the vinegar brine to be fully pickled by the time the judges taste them. This is certainly the last pickle I'll be able to enter this year.