Recipe 2: Carrot & Grain Salad

In a stark contrast to the first recipe, this one was definitely more difficult to track down the ingredients for and actually also took longer to make. I was disappointed in the way the dish looked when I finished it but it (to my surprise) tasted good!

This recipe features garden carrots, pomegranate, feta cheese, mint, and "mixed grains". I was so excited to eat this one (because I love mint, pomegranate, and feta cheese) that I forgot to take pictures of the ingredients pre-cooking.

The Shopping Experience

I imagine this one will go down as one of the more difficult ones to shop for. Since "baby heirloom carrots" were required for this recipe, they were essentially impossible to get for this recipe. Baby heirlooms are only in season as very specific times of the year and after that season, full-size heirloom carrots are hard to find as well. I thought I remembered seeing multi-coloured heirloom carrots in my local grocery store a month or so prior to cooking this recipe and hoped they would still be available but I had no such luck. I decided to pick up some more commonly found garden carrots as a substitute; not as pretty but carrots are still carrots! 

Another bit of trouble was that Jamie Oliver shows his own brand of "cooked mixed grains" in the ingredients list and does not show or describe what is actually in this mythical mix of grains. Unfortunately, as I feared, not only did my local grocery stores not stock Jamie Oliver's brand of anything, they also did not have anything labelled "cooked mixed grains" in the rice/grains aisle. I honestly never wanted to live in a suburb more because I was convinced that the gigantic suburban supermarkets would be more like to have cooked grain products on their shelves. I ended up going to the bulk aisle and grabbed a small bag of mixed wild rice instead. This substitution wasn't ideal because I had no idea how to properly cook wild rice and the picture of the final product in the cookbook seemed to include other grains that did not look like rice. But what can you do?

The Cooking Experience

Since my carrots were not quite baby sized carrots, I was planning to cut a few of the larger ones in half lengthwise. DO NOT DO THIS if you have relatively slim carrots. I cut my finger pretty bad when my knife slipped off the side of the carrot and I had to put the cooking on pause to apply some Polysporin and stick a band-aid on.

If anyone plans to recreate this recipe, make sure to cook your rice/grains before you do anything else. This will allow enough time for them to not be piping hot when you plate the dish and makes sure you don't forget about them (like I did) when cooking everything else. That being said, if you bought the pre-cooked bags of grains, then you're good to go and can ignore me.

The recipe instructs you to "bash [the back of the pomegranate] with a spoon" to let the seeds fall nicely when plating but this really didn't work for me. I ended up just peeling the seeds out the fruit with my hands and sprinkled them around. It was way faster. 

The Eating Experience

Even though I didn't get the right carrots or the exact grains, this recipe still tasted great! I genuinely think I would try making it again; especially since I have now learned how to cook wild rice.

I think I put more feta cheese than I was meant to but honestly, a part of me actually with I put more! I'm a huge fan of feta and this tartness of the pomegranates combined with the starch from the rice and carrots really worked well with the salty creaminess of the feta.

Because of the serving of rice that came with this dish, it is perfectly suitable to be a main course type of salad as both my boyfriend and I felt nice and full after we ate.

Final Thoughts

Based on these first two recipes, I would say that Jamie Oliver seems to really have a knack for being able to put together flavours that may not come to mind right away as perfect combinations but somehow they all work together perfectly. Good job, sir.

Total estimated cook time: 18 min
Total actual cook time: 50 min (mostly due to needing to cook the wild rice)