Look, we totally meant to read this one click-baity article from some time ago that was all about how baby carrots are gross somehow, but then we had an epiphany: We fucking love baby carrots, and ain’t nothing gonna get between us and them.
In fact, as we speak, we are about to go to town on this thing of baby carrots that we packed up at home. We don’t know how they’re so small and we don’t wanna know—we just know we like the taste and that we’ve eaten them so often we can see with the best of ‘em. Like, we can see through time, man. We can see a flea on the sea from 50 nautical miles away (we think that’s good, we don’t know how maritime law works).
So this obviously got us thinking about what’s up with carrots, and we realized that our knowledge is spotty at best. Said knowledge boils down to this: Carrots are often orange, crunchy; something about helping eyesight. And you know what that means, baby! Time for a completely accurate and in no way jokey fact/history lesson on the noble carrot!
Carrots, while technically a root, hail from the apiaceae family, which also includes celery, weirdly (and we say weirdly because celery tastes like hot nothing and carrots taste good as hell). And though, like most plants we can eat, their ultimate origins can’t be tied down to, like, latitude and longitude coordinates, prevailing wisdom seems to place their earliest days in Iran.
Yellow and purple carrots were domesticated in Asia throughout the 10th century, but the entirely more commonplace orange variety we know and love can be traced to 17th century Netherlands. No word on whether that has anything to do with the Dutch House of Orange-Nassau (y’know, like a mascot veggie), but we like to think the 17th century Netherlandertals (a really cool word for the Dutch we just invented) were just petty enough to force their farmers to make their root veggies orange when possible.
The teetotaling dorks at the Washington State Department of Agriculture claim that one medium carrot or a handful of baby carrots can count as one serving of veggies for the day, so that’s pretty cool. Side note? If you’re quitting ciggies or smoking joints, you can pretend a baby carrot is a fat chootie so as to maintain the oral fixation/ritual of the blunt circle/ciggie sharing seminar.
Why did we have that thing about carrots being good for your eyes in our head? Simple—because carrots are a crazy-good source of beta-carotene. Our bodies transform beta-carotene into Vitamin A, which is good for our eyes and bones and teeth and skin. Did we once crack a tooth on a too-hard carrot? Yes, but our eyes worked so well because of our carrot lust that we were able to find the itty-bitty tooth pieces on the floor after that. Did our dentist want them? Nope. We should maybe get rid of that baggie with our tooth chunklets one of these days. Anyway, #Eyesight!
Baby carrots aren’t grown as babies (duh), they’re big-ass regular carrots that get shaved down and smoothed. Why do they taste so good, then? Well, carrots have some of the highest natural sugar content of allllll the veggies in allllll the land (only beets have more), so they taste pretty good on their own, raw. They also taste good when you sautée them with a little butter and a light dusting of brown sugar. Pop ‘em on a plate next to a porkchop? Oooweee!!
Carrots are also high in fiber, which is a major concern we have as we phase from not-old to yes-old. We’re always on the lookout for fiber that we don’t have to stir into our water (fuck outta here, husks of things that get powderized!), which brings us back to our original point: We are about to go to town on these baby carrots. The end.
Basically us.
Also
- We know this is cutting it way close, but the Feast New Mexico Legislator's Night at the Farmers Market Pavilion pops off from 7-9 pm on Wednesday, Jan. 29. For a mere $10, you can hobnob with ranchers and farmers and food folks, plus legislators and some band called Those Guys featuring Tom Williams (anyone remember that Kids in the Hall sketch about Rod Torfulson’s Armade featuring Herman Menderchuck?). Anyway, we only just now learned about it, and since Le Fork drops on Tuesdays now (we know, we don’t like it either…we miss Thursdays), we’re telling you on Tuesday. Sorry if you read this after that and miss this thing. More info and tickets are riiiiiiight ooooooveeerrrrrrr here.
- Here’s a little reminder about the Souper Bowl from The Food Depot food bank, that annual event that finds two-dozen local chefs and their staffs creating excellent soups for your tasting enjoyment, then all the money goes to the Food Depot. This year’s lineup of chefs and restaurants is huge, so click this link to check it out and to get tickets, which in turn become soups from chefs you either love already or are about to love. It all goes down on Saturday, Feb. 1 at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center.
- Maybe it’s old news by now, but three Santa Fe chefs found their names on the semifinalist list for this year’s James Beard Awards: Joseph Wrede of Joseph’s Culinary Pub; Christian Pontiggia of Sassella; and Fernando Ruiz of Escondido. You can read about it (including the always fun thing where someone doesn’t realize they’ve received an honor until their friends and families start texting) riiiiight here. Santa Fe chefs and eateries are, of course, no strangers to the award. Why, The Compound’s Mark Kiffin won one in 2005, and Sazón’s Fernando Olea won one in 2022. We think The Shed has one, too, but we don’t remember right now and there’s no way we’re calling them to be like, “Hi, can someone go in the lobby and tell us if we are remembering correctly that there’s a JBA there?” As always, we’re disappointed that the award isn’t called The Beardo, but if there’s one thing we’ve learned having written about food for years, it’s that people who do CAPITAL-I IMPORTANT FOOD STUFF don’t like to laugh so much as they like to scream and act like there’s some new way to make whipped cream (there isn’t—we perfected it, dammmmit!!!!!!).
- Mayhaps you heard the one about how Blake’s Lotaburger will add a $1 surcharge to any menu item with eggs? We mention this mainly because we’ll hand it to Blake’s—their brekkie b is amaaaaazingly good (you can get bacon AND sausage, baby!). Anyway, we think $1 is a little steep, but we’re not an economist so much as we’re a carrot scholar.
- Valentine’s Day has never been deadlier (would be a DOPE horror movie tagline) with the folks from the Blaze Christian Fellowship presenting a V-Day Murder Mystery Dinner on Feb. 14. For $40 per person ($50 if y’all wanna bring your kids but they babysit the kids), you’ll get access to a prix fixe menu including Caesar salad, chicken marsala, veggie lasagna and gelato con frutti (sing “and gelato con frutti” to the tone of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti,” please). Plus there’s the murder mystery fun part, so that should be fun. Get tickets and more info here.
- This actually reminds us that all kinds of restaurants will be up to V-Day madness, so you should think about that now while it’s still kind of early. Y’dig? Please know that most menus will likely be prix fixe, you’ll probably have to like strawberry shortcake and you should tip huge because it’s a terrible night to work for restaurant folk.
- Since you people have the reading comprehension of a gaggle of drunk children, we’ll remind you that Santa Fe Restaurant Week is forthcoming from Monday, Feb. 17-Wednesday, Feb. 26. So you can stop writing to ask us. If you’d like to learn more or to see the full list of restaurants, click here. If you’d like to get real, we invite you to do so. Naw, we’re just playin’. In reality, we think it’s great that Santa Fe restaurants come together to be great at food. You’d be amazed how many ABQ people we’ve met who are like, “Why don’t you guys have good restaurants?” And we’re like, “Do you mean Panera? God, ABQ, you’re so lame!”
- We’re tired of pretending we don’t find the term “eats” disgusting. We think if you put “eats” on the sign of your restaurant or “eats” in your food write-up, you should be banned from food. The only place it’s OK to use the term “eats” is when you’re dunking on it with the ferocity of Shaq, but, like, you also absorbed the powers of the Hulk—that’s how hard that term should be dunked upon.
- Holy smokes, did you know De Vargas Center-based restaurant Dr. Field Goods does wine specials on Wednesdays? According to the Facebook post we saw, we’re talkin’ half-off bottles plus other specials. Between that and the Tuesday night French dip (the best damn dip in downtown or any district), we’re like, “See you there, dorks!”
We love you, Herman Menderchuck.
More Tidbits
- OK, so Trump is president and Elon Musk is brazenly popping off Nazi salutes and everything feels terrible and we’re tired. Well, there’s more bad news, because that’s precisely what these people want from you—to be too tired to do anything. And while we won’t tell anyone what to feel per se, we will say that there are small ways to get educated so you can at least mega-dunk on whatever Trump loser you meet next. In this case? We’re talking about how the current tariff threats might affect the wine and spirits world, including those who imbibe. In a super-interesting new piece on Bon Appétit-dot-com, writer Anna Lee C. Iijima breaks down how tariffs work, what they actually are and how they’ll start to hit the shit we hold dear (like liquor). It is very much worth a look.
- Huh. Apparently according to market research firm YouGov, the most popular grocery store in America isn’t Whole Foods or Albertson’s or Kroger or Smith’s or even Alpha Beta or, like, Vons (if they still have those?) or Trader Joe’s—it’s 7-Eleven. Here we thought it was just where you went to steal cigarettes and play Street Fighter II and Golden Axe, but it turns out that you can get food there. Y’know, not meat or whatever, but if you’re living on chips and pizza in tube form and old-ass donuts, then here’s your place. Trader Joe’s reportedly came in a close second, and there’s even more info via Real Simple-dot-com. PS: We’re pretty sure you could get nudie magazines there, too, at one point.
- File this under not-just-local/but-also-still-kinda-local: The folks at grocery delivery mega-corp Instacart have compiled what they believe to be the most popular hot sauces by state based on their own shoppers’ data, and New Mexico’s is reportedly 505 Southwestern. Yikes. When Santa Fe’s Apicklelypse is right there with flavors like Ooga Booga and Werewolf Piss? Do better, New Mexico. Apicklelypse rules. Still, at least we’re not those Frank’s Red Hot assholes on the East Coast and a few other regions. If you click that link to Instacart above, you can see the whole map.
- And that’s three not-just-from-here-but-a-little-from-here things. We’re gonna ask you one more time if you’re good with us sticking to three, because we can always do more if you want them. Let us know.
A Totally Scientific Breakdown of The Fork’s Correspondence
Number of Letters Received
23
*Many of you are concerned about the new way you receive The Fork. We hear you and will pass your concerns along. Regardless, it means so much to us that you want to find and read The Fork. The Fork loves you. If The Fork could cry human tears, we would.
Most Helpful Tip (A Barely Edited Comment From a Reader)
Sandwiches.
*Is this like a The Graduate thing, but with sandwiches instead of plastics? #Dododododododododododododo
Actually Helpful Tip
“Have you been to Anthony’s Grill, Fork?”
*Yes, we have, and we loooooooove that place. In fact, let us link to it here. Y’all should go!
Carrotted away,
The Fork