I am not a very good side dish person. I would like to be, but by the time I've done the main course, I don't want to do any more washing/chopping/dressing. I just want to sit down and eat. It's a shame, because I really enjoy vegetables and salads once they're cooked.
I'm glad I decided to make this salad, though, because it was really easy (I had the oven on for the main dish anyway) and super delicious. Most of the time when I think of carrot salad, I think of the ubiquitous grated carrot salad with a lemon vinaigrette that is available in most cafeterias and supermarkets here. This salad is nothing like that. The carrots are roasted until almost done and then brushed with a honey-olive oil sauce (I added a generous pinch of that Aleppo pepper that Melissa enjoys so much) and roasted some more. You also roast some nuts in that same sauce: the recipe called for almonds, but I decided to substitute pistachios so that I'd have an excuse to buy some, open the package, and snack on the remaining nuts.
All you do then is crack open a bag of greens (the recipe called for arugula, but no-one in our family really enjoys arugula salad), make a simple lemon-olive oil vinaigrette (I punched it up with whole-grain mustard, as Melissa suggests), toss in the carrots and nuts, and enjoy a delightful salad. There were 7 of us at dinner, and everyone seemed to enjoy the salad: several people commented on it, and Julia kept an anxious eye on the salad as it went around, hoping for seconds. I loved the nutty, sweet, tangy, spicy flavor combination and also the combination of room temperature vegetables and cold salad greens. I would certainly make this again. A couple of variations that would be nice: using cumin and coriander and/or raz el hanout (the Moroccan spice blend) in the honey blend (North Africans do a lot of cooked carrot salads, it seems), adding avocado to the salad, just eating the carrots and nuts as is (we love glazed carrots around here).
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