Carrot Pilaf — A Simple Side for the Saturday Table

The cold broke late in the week and the temperature came up briefly into the thirties on Saturday, the kind of midwinter pause that Vermont gives you every few weeks as a reminder that the cold is not infinite, only persistent. I took advantage of it to do the deep clean of the woodstove that the start-of-February cleaning calls for, sweeping the ash drawer, scraping the inside of the firebox with the wire brush, checking the gasket on the door and finding it acceptable for another month. The stove has been in this house since 1981, when my father and I installed it together at Helen's insistence, and it has needed exactly two new gaskets and one new chimney liner in forty-three years of constant winter use, which is the kind of durability that is no longer manufactured into anything you can buy. The stove will outlast me. I am not bothered by this.

Made baked beans Saturday — the proper full Saturday operation, dried navy beans soaked Friday night, the bean pot with onion in the bottom, salt pork on top, molasses and dry mustard and a pinch of brown sugar dissolved in hot water and poured over, the lid on, into the oven at two hundred and twenty-five for nine hours. The kitchen smelled all day of the beans and the molasses and the slow rendering of the salt pork, and at supper I had the beans with brown bread and a slice of leftover ham and was content in the particular way that a Saturday-night bean supper makes me content, which is a contentment I learned at a kitchen table in this house when I was four years old and that I have never found a substitute for.

The blog post for the week was about the bean pot itself — the actual ceramic vessel, the brown one with the narrow top and the rounded body, which was my mother's and which she received from her mother and which has been baking beans in this kitchen on Saturday nights for somewhere around a hundred and ten years now, give or take. I wrote about how the shape of the pot is not decorative, the narrow top there to keep the beans from drying out during the long bake and the rounded body designed to hold the heat evenly through the nine hours, and how a man who buys a Le Creuset Dutch oven and uses it for baked beans is making a fine pot of beans but is not making a New England bean-pot bean, and the difference is real if subtle. I posted it. Comments came in within an hour. A man in Maine said his grandmother had used the same pot. A woman in Massachusetts asked where she could find one, and I said: an estate sale, mostly. They are not made at scale anymore. The man in Maine offered to send her one of his three. I did not know I was running a marketplace, but apparently I was, and the trade went through in the comments without my involvement.

Anna called Sunday from Brattleboro. The hard case from a few weeks ago has been resolved as well as a hard case can be resolved, which is to say not completely but enough to allow her to put it down and take up the next one. She said she had thought about my advice — the long cooking thing — and had spent her one free Saturday in three weeks making a coq au vin from a recipe she found online, and the cooking had taken five hours and she had drunk a glass of the cooking wine while she cooked it and the next day had been the best day she had had in a month. I told her: that is exactly how it works. She said: I knew you were right. I said: you knew I might be right. She laughed. There is a particular pleasure in being teased by your granddaughter. It is one of the small late dividends of the long work of being a grandfather.

The bean supper is the centerpiece, and I would not suggest otherwise — but a good Saturday table wants something alongside it, something that cooks quietly on the back burner while the beans finish their nine hours in the oven. This carrot pilaf has filled that role more than once in this kitchen: inexpensive, unfussy, and possessed of a gentle sweetness that does not compete with the molasses in the beans but keeps company with it. Anna, when she visited last autumn, had two helpings and asked for the method, which is about the highest compliment a simple vegetable dish can receive.

Carrot Pilaf

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 25 minutes | Total Time: 35 minutes | Servings: 4

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 small yellow onion, finely diced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 3 medium carrots, peeled and grated (about 1 1/2 cups)
• 1 cup long-grain white rice
• 2 cups low-sodium chicken or vegetable broth, warmed
• 1/2 teaspoon salt, or to taste
• 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
• 2 tablespoons fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped (optional, for finishing)

Instructions

1. Soften the aromatics. In a medium heavy-bottomed saucepan, melt the butter with the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened and just beginning to turn golden, about 6 to 8 minutes.
2. Add garlic and carrots. Stir in the minced garlic and grated carrots. Cook for 2 to 3 minutes, stirring frequently, until the carrots have softened slightly and the garlic is fragrant.
3. Toast the rice. Add the rice to the pan and stir to coat it in the butter and oil. Cook for 1 to 2 minutes, stirring constantly, until the grains look slightly opaque and smell faintly nutty.
4. Season and add broth. Stir in the salt, pepper, and cumin. Pour in the warmed broth and bring to a gentle boil, scraping up any bits from the bottom of the pan.
5. Simmer covered. Reduce heat to low, place a tight-fitting lid on the pan, and cook undisturbed for 18 minutes, or until the rice has absorbed all the liquid and is tender.
6. Rest and fluff. Remove the pan from heat and let it sit, still covered, for 5 minutes. Uncover, fluff gently with a fork, taste for seasoning, and finish with chopped parsley if desired. Serve warm.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 240 | Protein: 5g | Fat: 7g | Carbs: 39g | Fiber: 2g | Sodium: 310mg