Kohl rabi is a member of the brassica family, a group which includes broccoli, cabbage, brussel sprouts, and more. Roughly translated from german as “cabbage turnip,” this is a pretty accurate description for this sputnik shaped vegetable. I only discovered it a year or two ago when it was included in a veg box I ordered, and I’ve really grown to enjoy it. Some vegetables are just so much better raw!

Recipe Notes

I go back and forth between using cider vinegar and white wine vinegar in this salad recipe. I think cider vinegar provides a slightly stronger taste, but both are good. Rice vinegar is also an option.

If you’re not keen on the peanuts, try mixing some peanut butter in with the dressing instead. A similar flavour but with a different texture, this is equally good. I know a lot of peanut butter fans who aren’t keen on peanuts (I used to be one of them).

Be careful with the garlic if you’re planning to serve this immediately; I’m as big a fan as the next guy but fresh garlic can be a bit much for some people. This is less a worry if you use a pestle and mortar to grind everything together because you won’t have any lumps of hot garlic to sneak out and bite your mouthly innards.

As with many of my recipes, the ingredient proportions are more of a suggestion. You should taste as you go to decide what you do and don’t like and what flavours you want to stand out or blend in (soy sauce vs vinegar vs sesame oil, ginger vs garlic, etc…). Add more carrot, add celery, add whatever you think works (then report back and let me know how it went)!

Raw or fried, the carrot is a versatile beast. It forms the base of our vegetable stocks and complements many a Sunday lunch, boiled with peas or roasted with a glaze of delicious olive oil. Yes, the carrot forms a major part of our diet, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

I’d just bought some smokey chipotle chili powder at Borough Market and I had some carrots in desperate need of use. Faced with both the guilt of letting perfectly good vegetables go to waste and the desire to try out my new purchase, I combined the two in this oven roasted recipe.

One of the best ways to cook carrots, in my opinion, is rolled up in foil with a bunch of agave or brown sugar with a vegan butter substitute, and simply baked. Sweet and spicy similarly sounded like a good combination, one that would work well with the already sweet flavour carrots naturally provide, so I decided to go with an agave nectar based marinade.

I baked the carrots in a lattice for aesthetic reasons, but I’m not going to go into that here. The flavour is the same if you bung them in foil and the lattice is a pain in the arse (a pretty pain in the arse, but a pain nevertheless). If you do want to get fancy and you don’t bake in foil, however, you’ll need to reduce the cooking time (especially if you slice the carrots as thin as in the picture above).

The ingredients provided below are more of a suggestion than a recipe. I admittedly didn’t measure, so if your oven goes into meltdown then… well, anyway.

Hmm, that doesn’t sound very exciting, does it? Here’s the thing: I got a mandolin slicer, I had a huge bag of carrots, and I wanted to play. Enough said.

To make the pinwheel carrot shape, just score down 4 sides of each carrot and cut a small sliver out before slicing the carrots as usual. If you don’t have a mandolin, feel free to cut with a plain ol’ knife!

This doesn’t really merit a recipe as such because it’s so easy. The carrots (2) are raw, tossed in a dressing of garlic (mucho, mucho!), a pinch of fenugreek powder, and and a pinch of cumin. I simply fried the dressing ingredients in a little bit of olive oil before tossing in the carrots. It’s very yummy. Very, very yummy. And so easy!

And boy is this a short entry. Enjoy your carrots (a vegetable that is usually so much better raw than cooked).