Carrots in the Frugal Food Plan

Everyone knows that eating carrots is good for your eyesight, but carrots are also good for frugal desserts! And frugal salads and frugal side dishes and frugal snacking - and that's good for your food budget.

They're readily available year 'round, with only a little seasonal change in prices because they're grown (mostly in California) during the southern cold weather season and grown in the north during the hot weather season when it's too hot for southern areas.

To be even more frugal, you can grow this munchy food in your backyard or in a deep pot. They like sandy or loose soil and sunshine. After harvesting, you can keep them for several months in cool, damp sand or just in a closed plastic bag with a few drops of water. Always choose the best of the crop for keeping any food in the fresh state. They're easy to can and dehydrate, too.

Now for the disillusionment

Carrots haven't always been orange. I don't know if rabbits munched on shades of purple carrots many years ago, but that was the prevailing color, along with red, white, black and yellow. Yellow carrots first appeared in Afghanistan in pre-Hellenic times, but both types - yellow and purple were used by ancient Greeks and Romans, but not for food. They were for medicinal purposes. It was after the Renaissance that carrots were cultivated and improved from the tough and fibrous root to a vegetable closer to what we now know and people began to use them widely for food. The orange color was developed at this time, too, and the carrot was reborn.

It now comes in shapes and sizes from long and skinny to short and fat - or as the mysterious "baby carrot."

What, exactly, are baby carrots?

They're plain (as in full grown) carrots. They're made of a type of carrot that is slender and grown closely together to keep them that way. When they're harvested at maturity, they're cut into lengths, peeled mechanically and sold as "baby" carrots.

To make it even more interesting, baby carrots were at first created from the regular size and kind of carrot you see in bags at the grocery store. The split, broken, twisted and otherwise ugly carrots that were unacceptable for packaging, were cut into 2 inch pieces, peeled and sold as baby carrots.

Real baby carrots - immature carrots sold in specialty shops - are not as nutritious as full grown ones, only containing about 70% as much beta carotene. While baby carrots are mild flavored and crisp, they're not as sweet as full grown carrots, so you're wasting your money and losing out on the flavor by buying this "elite" and expensive food.

How to buy carrots

* Look for smooth, well shaped carrots.
* Hair roots may mean that the carrot is old and has been in moist storage for some time, so avoid those if possible (however, carrots keep very well in moist cold storage).
* Look for a bright reddish orange with little or no variation in color. Pale colored carrots are lacking nutrition.
* Check the top or shoulder of the carrot to be sure it's fresh looking. It can be green (an indication of it growing up and out of the soil), but it shouldn't be brown or black, which means the carrot has been in storage a very long time.
* Cracked carrots are generally fine to eat, but may present a problem when trimming, so use your own judgement.
* Look for narrow shoulders. A carrot's sweetness is mostly in the outer flesh, and wide shoulders means a large core, which is tougher and not as sweet.

If you're not into eating a lot of carrots, look up carrot recipes on the internet. What you'll find should encourage you to expand your menus - and shrink your food budget.