Culinary creativity took flight and found a home with the creation of the internet. It was on this magical place where I was first introduced to rainbows taking the form of cookies and carrots replacing hotdogs, and I could not let both recipes go uncooked.
I decided to start off with making rainbow cookies. Making them was surprisingly simple; I was basically just making sugar cookies with food dye. After finding a sugar cookie recipe and making the sugar cookie dough (and eating some too), I separated the dough into different bowls and added different colors to each bowl.
Now, this is when things started to get messy. Because the dough was already formed and had spent a few minutes in the refrigerator, I had to mainly use my hands to completely mix the dye in after partly mixing it in with a generic medal silverwear spoon. After dying the dough, I pinched off pieces of different colored dough and rolled them into separate balls. I then used various ways to combine the different colored pieces, such as twisting and squishing hem together, before rolling them out and cutting out medium sized circles.
Baking and rolling the dough was a piece of cake, but the results were disappointing. The cookies came out dry and dull looking, but I realized that I could easily solve this problem in the future. The dryness of the cookie can be improved with a better recipe and the dull color was because I used a mix of wheat and bleached flour. So, after disappointing cookies, I was hoping that the mysterious carrot hotdog recipe would turn out amazing, but I still had low expectations for this hotdog imposter.
The first step to transforming the unlikely candidates, carrots, into resembling a stick of beef was steaming my nine carrots until they were soft, but not mushy. This part took me around eight minutes and after my carrots were finished in their sauna on the stove, I put them under cold water for a few seconds.
I then placed them in the marinade I had created that composed of a cup of soy sauce, a cup of water, a half of a cup of rice vinegar, a fourth of a cup of sesame oil, two minced cloves of garlic, a tablespoon of minced ginger and a few pinches of black pepper. The smell of the marinade, which reminded me of Asian food, made my mouth water as I put the lid on the container that held the marinating carrots. I left the carrots bathing in their amazing mixture for around 24 hours before setting them on the grill set on medium-high heat for ten minutes.
When my carrots, or should I say hotdogs, were done cooking and had cooled down, I took a bite. The taste that hit my taste buds was nothing less than shockingly amazing. My mind was blown. The taste that filled my mouth was smoky and immediately reminded me of a hotdog, even though the carrots’ textures between the two differed. Now, I don’t think in ten years that people are going to start grilling marinated carrots at their fourth of July picnics, but what I have tasted is nothing less than culinary magic and deserves to at least be given a chance.
If there is anything that I have learned from this culinary excursion into the world of weird recipes, it is this: food will surprise you, the most unlikely foods can end up making your taste buds sing. And so I leave you with these words of wisdom: make carrot hotdogs. They are amazing.