A Note on Carrot Jam

Much of our cooking these days has been rushed off the stove, short-order style. After a while this becomes depressing: some of our recent meals, stretching into last week, have been decidedly monochromatic. A warm French potato salad with bacon and red onion. Tasty, sure, in moderation. But it's a side dish. So when there's nothing else to accompany it, it grows tedious P.D.Q. A bowl of potatoes can only take you so far.

So it was with no small relief that we broke out of our funk this past weekend and made a few things.

I even invented a recipe. This may be a first.

The dish even has a name. It's called "Pork with Carrot Confit." (Pork with Carrot Jam sounds peculiar, after all). The idea began with the details for a "Breakfast in Cairo" from Rozanne Gold's Recipes 1-2-3 Menu Cookbook, which is perhaps the most minimalist cookbook I've ever come across. Every dish uses only three ingredients, save salt and pepper. Pretty remarkable, especially since this allows plenty of room for experimentation.

Along with strained yogurt and Ful Madammas, beakfast in Cairo included a carrot jam: this is essentially a marmalade made from grated carrots, lemon, and sugar.

We now have a jar of it in our fridge.

For the pork recipe, I braised 4 pork ribs in carrot juice and garlic: first browning the ribs on all sides in a little olive oil, and then adding two cloves of chopped garlic and about two cups of carrot juice to deglaze the pan. I kept the temperature very low so as not to scorch the juice. The meat simmered, covered, for two hours or so.

Meanwhile, I made the jam by combining 2 pounds of grated carrots with six cups of sugar, two cups of water, and the juice of three lemons (to make 1/2 cup of lemon juice). This simmers for about an hour and a half, until the liquid thickens.

I then added about half a cup of the jam to the simmering pork chops; I also added a few whole miniature carrots, which were peeled. (The carrots had arrived with our farm share, and consisted of a mix of sizes and shapes. The tiniest were annoying enough to peel, and simply impossible to grate. So I tossed 'em in whole).

The addition of the jam makes the pork rather sweet, so one is advised to be judicious at this point. I wanted to be bold, but found that the pork could handle more jam than I'd suspected. I finished the dish by reducing the braising liquid to a fairly thick consistency and adding about a 1/2 tablespoon of sherry vinegar.

To complement the glazed pork I served it with tomato rice and some swiss chard sautéed with raisins and pine nuts; the chard added a useful note of bitterness to the plate.

All in all, not bad. Some ginger might have complemented the carrots nicely, and I wonder how else I might have finished the dish; in concept, the whole thing wasn't far off from many of the meat recipes in the Silver Palate cookbook, which make ready use of jams, jellies and compotes.

And now the next question is how best to use a jar of carrot jam.