Recipe 10 - Tahini Carrot Slaw

This recipe was a bit disappointing for me to make because drumroll... I’m allergic to apples! I know a few people who are actually also allergic to apples and it causes people like us to have very itchy lips and throats when eating them and very itchy skin when handling peeled raw apples. I didn’t want to skip this recipe though because it does look pretty tasty, I’ve been curious about homemaking tahini sauce, and I figured my boyfriend could eat it since he loves carrots. I did make him work for this full serving of coleslaw though because, since my hands weren’t able to handle peeling and chopping up the apples, I made him do almost all of the manual labour. Take help when you can get it, right?

The Shopping Experience

The only ingredient that really gave me some trouble while shopping was the “mixed raw seeds”. Not only does Jamie not outline what seeds I’m really supposed to be looking for when buying mixed seeds, but also, nothing in my grocery store was explicitly labeled “mixed seeds” either. This resulted in me having to stare deeply into at the picture of the slaw in the book and guess what the most important seeds seemed to be. I settled on something from the bulk section of Urban Fare that was labeled “salad topping” that featured pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, and other smaller seeds.

Another slightly confusing ingredient was the “crunchy eating apple”. As someone who is not particularly educated on types of apples, aren’t all apples crunchy and for eating? In this case, I just let my boyfriend choose his favourite apple that he most wanted to eat. We went for royal gala apples; which my boyfriend claims are the best apples but is they really? I guess I'll never know! 

The recipe also called for a close of garlic but I had a jar of minced fresh garlic at home so I just decided to use that and not spend more money that I had to in order to just get a single garlic clove. Some may say I'm lazy but I prefer frugal!

The Cooking Experience

Overall, this recipe was much more labour intensive than it really should have been. We were missing two crucial kitchen tools: a mandolin and a pestle and mortar. I cannot stress enough how much our cooking time increased because of the lack of tools. Without a mandolin, we manually julienned all the carrots which is harder than it sounds! I never worked with multi-coloured (yellow and purple) carrots before but I quickly discovered that they are much harder than orange carrots so chopping them took a lot more force.

The pestle and mortar situation meant crushing the seeds was also much harder. I channelled my inner MacGyver and substituted using a wooden spoon and sturdy ceramic bowl to pound them.

After chopping up all the carrots, my boyfriend made the very solid point that we probably should have just used the orange and purple carrots since the yellow ones look too much like the apples so the colour of the dish is a bit too yellowy. But oh well, we already cut them all up and we weren't about to discard anything for pure aesthetics. Besides, Jamie's picture of the ingredients showed one of each carrot so that's what we're sticking to!

While chopping up all the carrots and apples, my boyfriend and I also ran into the issue of finding the right bow to mix everything in. We actually ended up switching in/out 3 different mixing bowls because, once julienned, the ingredients yielded much more volume than we thought they would.

The Eating Experience

Unfortunately, I can’t comment too much on the taste of the dish since I didn’t want to risk giving myself an itchy mouth situation. However, I did pick out a couple bites of just the carrots and gave the salad a taste. I was pleasantly surprised! The tahini sauce seemed too simple to be tasty when we were making it but it was really nice; nutty and tangy.

The following comments are from my boyfriend:

The salad was high in acidity, probably due to the royal gala apples. The light nutty/seedy flavour lingers in the mouth in a nice way that helps ease the acidity. The sweetness of the apple counters the earthy flavours of the carrots and tahini well. An even sweeter apple could enhance this and a tarter apple like a Granny Smith would definitely make it the salad taste worse.

Final Thoughts

All in all, I don’t think I would ever make a return to this salad. Hm, I think that’s the first time I’m saying that about any recipe! Firstly, I can’t really even eat this salad because of the apples and secondly, without those previously mentioned kitchen tools, this recipe’s prep time and amount of labour waaaay outweighs the end result.  

As usual, the flavours of this salad were good but, man oh man, just save yourself the effort and go buy something similar at your local healthy market or café.

Total estimated cook time: 20 minutes

Total actual cook time: 1 hour and 15 minutes (goddamn!)