I’ve done cabbage. Now it’s the carrot’s turn. It is of course an easier sell than the poor old cabbage, but I still believe that our pointy little orange friend is more often than not underused and overcooked.

I once spent a summer drinking carrot juice every morning before work – not only did it taste great, but my skin took on a rather fetching orange hue – maybe I should be sharing this information with some of our less intelligent minor celebrities – would save them a fortune on fake tan. The only slightly annoying thing about it is that in order to make enough juice to fill a glass, you end up with a mountain of unusable dry matter that you have to scrape from each element of your juicer, thus requiring you to disassemble, rinse and reassemble everything every time you fancy a glug. So it can be a pain in the arse. That said, if you can be bothered you should try it for a sustained period – I’m also led to believe that it’s good at cancer too…

Carrot and coriander salad

This salad has a clean, sharp taste and goes really well with fish, chicken and lamb. It’s so easy: grate the carrot, chop some coriander, add a little red onion if you like, season generously, squeeze over the juice of a lime, sprinkle over a handful of pumpkin and sunflower seeds then add either olive oil or sesame oil depending on which you prefer.

How to cook carrots 

I think this is important. It’s so easy to cook carrots in a way that keeps them beautifully sweet and crunchy – there is no excuse to boil the life out of the poor things. This is how I nearly always do them:

Firstly, you don’t need to peel them. You also don’t need to cut them lengthways into little batons – the 90’s are long gone – get with it people. Simply chop the carrots into discs slightly thinner than a pound coin and drop them into a pan of cold water until you need them. 10 minutes before you want to eat, drain all the water apart from about a cm in the bottom of the pan, season with salt and pepper, add a large knob of butter (and maybe even a teaspoon of caster sugar) and put it on the heat with the lid on for about 5 minutes, Then remove the lid and let the liquid reduce for a couple more minutes. Keep trying them and as soon as they are the almost right for you, take them off the heat. Nothing lost – just sweet, tasty and perfectly cooked…