Carrot tops and local food meal possibilities

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While the nickname “carrot top” might once have applied to me, I am not thinking of red hair.  I am thinking about those lovely, lacy green  leaves on my carrots that need to be thinned.  The ones surrounding the green onions in this photo:

In my developing morning ritual of sitting on the deck and watching the birds at the feeder and looking looking over my garden, I began to wonder if baby carrot tops could be eaten.  According to the Carrot Museum, you can eat them though they don’t make them sound all that appetizing. The Carrot Museum notes that some people view the greens as dangerous to eat.  This is evident from this thread over at VegWeb.com and this one on Chow Hound where some people warn about eating them and others offer suggestions for how they have eaten them. The conclusion for them is that I will give them a try; I hope I like them better than the radish leaves I tried (that was a texture issue).

Some people are starting One Local Summer posts today.  Others see the first post as being due next Sunday.  I have been trying to come up with an entirely local meal for today as either my first or a practice OLS meal depending on your point of view.  We have had a cooler than normal spring and the first day of the season at Chesterton’s European Market didn’t offer much in the way of produce.   A mental inventory tells me that my local foods on hand in the kitchen include:  honey, Capriole goat cheese, Fair Oaks Sweet Swiss cheese, Fair Oaks milk, some frozen tomato puree from last summer, some garlic from last fall, some dried pears and berries from Lehman’s Orchard in Niles, Michigan, and the ground beef that I bought from Farm Direct Meat.  From my container garden, I can pick some Freckles lettuce leaves; green onions; a few kale or bok choy leaves; a handful of baby spinach leaves; good sized portions of parsely, thyme chives, oregano, and cilantro; a few Thai basil leaves; a snippet or two of rosemary, dill, or fennel; and/or a couple of sage leaves. Of course there are also the carrot thinnings.

The thing missing from those lists is any sort of starch or even eggs to provide a foundation for a meal.   This means the meal is likely to be more meat centered than I prefer.

Option 1: I could have a hamburger patty and a salad or even just a salad but that doesn’t sound appealing.

Option 2: I could fry up a ground meat mixture with some greens, minced garlic and herbs with a Greek or Indian twist to the spices and then wrap that mixture in lettuce leaves.  The goat cheese would be a nice addition if I go the Greek route.  Sounds better.

Option 3: I could make a sort of layered meat and greens loaf with a salad of fresh greens possibly topped with goat cheese and slivers of dried pears.  This sounds interesting too but would require a greater use of energy to use the oven than the stove top.

I’ll ponder the options more as the day goes on.  Perhaps additional ideas will present themselves.

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