Rainbow Carrot With Tamarind Sauce- حشوة رز بالتمر الهندي و الجزر ألأحمر
By: Mimi Cooks
Published: Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - 9:04pm

Ingredients




3 pounds 4- 5 large Rainbow Carrots, about You may use any color carrot available in your
Canola Oil
2 large onions
4 tablespoons Heaped Tamarind Concentrate, or Paste. It looks like very thick molasses
1 Juice of lemon
2 cups of short grain rice
1/2 pound of ground meat
Salt, Black Pepper, Allspice, Cinnam

Preparation

1 Peel the Carrots, cut 2 carrots into strips, and grate the rest. 2 Fry the strips and put them on the side on paper towel to get rid of the execs oil. 3 Dice the onions and fry them, put them on paper towel to absorb the execs oil. 4 In the same oil, add the grated carrots, add salt, cardamom. 5 In the same pot, add the fried onions on the grated fried carrots. Cook on high heat until the grated carrots are soft, this should take about 10 minutes. 6 Dissolve the Tamarind paste/concentrate in hot water to make the sauce. you need about 4-5 cups of hot water. the more water you add the less tangy the sauce is. 7 Add lemon juice on the Tamarind sauce. 8 Add half of the Tamarind sauce on the fried grated carrots. The sauce should not be too watery. 9 Boil the mix then simmer on low heat for 20 minutes. 10 Rice and ground meat stuffing Directions: 11 Wash and soak the rice for 15 minutes 12 Cook the ground meat by adding onions to it. Season it with Salt, Black Pepper, Cardamom, Allspice, Cinnamon. 13 Cook the meat until seared all over. 14 Drain the rice and add it to the meat. 15 Add the second half of the sauce to the rice and meat mix. let boil over on high heat then cover and simmer on low heat until the rice is done. The rice should take 25-30 minutes to fully cook. 16 To serve, place rice in the serving platter, arrange the fried carrot sticks and add the sauce with the grated carrots on top.

About


The other day I went to the market and found a pile of different looking carrots than the normal orange colored ones I always buy. Those carrots had bright and beautiful colors ranging from bright yellows, dark oranges to dark purples. Those carrots name is "Rainbow Carrots". It was the first time for me seeing such produce in this market and I wanted to try them. They have a very sweet taste for the high sugar content and they are a delight to look at since they have beautiful colors from the outside and inside.
When I was young, my grandmother used to make stuffed purple-reddish carrots with Tamarind sauce. She used to make a huge pot and have the whole family over for lunch. Those carrots would be in season only during the fall and part of the winter in the Middle East, so this meal was special because it was made only couple of times a year and it took a lot of labour to make it. The thick big purple-reddish carrots were hard to core out. It took couple of days and few people  to prepare.  
The carrots I found at the market were not big enough to stuff, besides, I was not going to attempt to core them out anyway. I had to modify this old recipe and make it easier to cook. I also tried to get the same taste of the original recipe by using concentrated Tamarind molasses for the sauce, which gave this recipe its very special taste and it transferred me back in time to when I was a child!