Grated Carrot-Beet Salad — Cook the Book Fridays

There is no cooking involved, except grating the carrots and making a salad dressing. No long work-out session in the kitchen. Felt more like cheating. Don’t get me wrong, I like easy recipes as much as the challenging ones. Who can resist an easy-to-do and a raw salad universally loved by all Frenchmen and women? Sixty millions plus people; they can’t be wrong about this!

Since this David Lebovitz’s recipe takes no time to put together, I let my imagination run wild with the variations. I added the beets making it a carrot-beet salad. Also felt compelled to keep some carrots whole, especially those teeny baby carrots I found in the farmers market. Keeping things wholesome and truthful takes on a whole new meaning amid all the divisiveness around.

David showed an interesting picture in My Paris Kitchen of a French Moulinex grater, called a mouli-julienne. It makes me giggle with delight every time I look at it. It looks like a spacecraft hoovering above the earth, while spitting out shreds of carrot julienne. I like collecting a whole host of cooking gadgets; this device is one of the strangest I’ve come across. I did not use a box grater, a stand mixer or a food processor to grate the carrots. Instead I used a hand julienne peeler by Kuhn Rikon. I managed to get long strands of carrots without much wastage, starting with a long oversized carrot. I was equally successful using the same peeler on cucumbers, green papayas and mangoes. Really neat handy tool.

The dressing is a good old standby, a honey mustard salad dressing using freshly squeezed lemon juice for the acid and olive oil for the fat component. Garnished with some mint and chopped parsley, this salad is light and easy to satisfy, with or without the preponderance of French DNA.

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