Carrot Stick Bundles Tied with Seaweed

For the past week, I have been enthralled by Japanese Vegetarian Cooking by Patricia Richland. I resisted buying this book for a while because I already had The Art of Japanese Vegetarian Cooking and wasn't very happy with it. It made Japanese food look so difficult and time-consuming to make that I began to think that any Japanese cookbook would be the same. But Richland's book is completely different: The recipes are fairly simple, many requiring less than six ingredients, and they make good use of fresh vegetables. I keep going back through it and finding dishes I want to try, so you can expect to see many little Japanese vegetable dishes, such as this one, in the weeks to come.

Carrot Stick Bundles is a good example of the kind of simple vegetable side dish the book is full of. I actually tried to fancy this one up a little by adding ginger (I love the taste of ginger with carrots) but I don't think it added much, so feel free to leave it out.

Carrot Stick Bundles Tied with Seaweed

sheet of nori (seaweed)
3-4 large carrots
fresh ginger, cut into 4 thin, quarter-sized slices
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon mirin (sweet rice wine)
1 teaspoon white sugar
1/4 tsp. sesame oil

Cut the nori into eight 1/2-inch strips and set aside.

Peel the carrots and cut them into matchsticks about 3-inches long. Combine the soy sauce, mirin, and sugar, and mix to combine.

Heat the sesame oil in a non-stick skillet over medium-high heat. Add the ginger, and stir-fry for about a minute. Add the carrot sticks and cook, stirring, for 2 more minutes. Add the soy sauce mixture and cook until most of the liquid has evaporated.

Remove the ginger, and divide the carrots into 8 equal piles. Gather each pile into a bundle, arranging the carrot sticks side by side. Wrap a nori strip around the middle of each bundle. (I found it easiest to put the strip down on a plate, lay the carrot bundle near one end of the strip, tuck the end of the strip over the bundle, and roll the carrots toward the other end.)

Place two bundles each on four serving plates, and serve drizzled with soy sauce or sesame oil.

I'll admit that bundling the carrot sticks was trickier than I thought it'd be; my sticks were more slender than they should have been, so they turned out a little on the limp side. I used a mandolin to make them uniform, but they would have probably come out better if I had cut them with a knife. What I think I'll do next time (and these were tasty, so there will be a next time) is skip the bundling and make little carrot "haystacks" with the nori cut fine and sprinkled on top. Unless I'm having company I want to impress!

Kid-Friendly Note: My daughter, who usually prefers her carrots raw, ate 3 of these and would have eaten more if we'd had any.

Tags: vegan recipes vegetarian cooking food fat-free