Carrots and Oil but not Lasagna

I was going to make another batch of lasagna this weekend but I might postpone that a few days. Having eaten a large casserole dish of lasagna over the past week, I'm a little burnt out on the stuff. Maybe next Tuesday or Wednesday I'll try out a slightly different variation on the lasagna theme. In the meantime I think I'll go for something a lot lighter. Carrots!

Brown-sugar Glazed Carrots

4 cups sliced carrots
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
2 tablespoons butter

You steam the carrots for about 6 minutes using a few tablespoons of water in the microwave. In the last half minute of cooking time, melt the butter and brown sugar together in the dish. Remove from microwave and toss the cooked carrots with the butter/sugar mixture.

Carrots and dill are in the same family and make a perfect combination. I'm going to try sprinkling fresh dill leaves over carrots before steaming them. I've never done that before and I might not like it. :-(

Now onto the "oil" section of today's post. According to a report in the Jan. 29 issue of the Geophysical Research Letters Titan, Saturn's orange moon, has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth.

These new findings are from a study led by Ralph Lorenz, who is a Cassini radar team member from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. They used new data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

Cassini has mapped about 20 percent of Titan's surface with radar and several hundred lakes and seas have been observed. Several dozen of them have been estimated to contain more hydrocarbon liquid than Earth's oil and gas reserves. Each one, that is!

According to the article, proven reserves of natural gas on Earth total 130 billion tons, enough to provide 300 times the amount of energy the entire United States uses annually for residential heating, cooling and lighting. Dozens of Titan's lakes individually have the equivalent of at least this much energy in the form of methane and ethane.

While that's all very interesting, I must notice that complex hydrocarbons half way across the solar system aren't terribly convienient for us. Now getting nuclear fusion to work in an economically feasable way. That would be great. We have no shortage of hydrogen to fuse.

Comments

Into the Light said…
I've never been fond of glazed carrots. I'm against adding sugar to vegetables in general -- part of the reason I don't eat sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving! -- but I have an acorn squash recipe that fills the cavity with butter and brown sugar that is REALLY good. It's hazardous though...

I'm not a fan of dill... I do eat it in some things, but it changes the original food so much that it wrecks most things IMO. Since I like carrots just the way they are, I'd skip the dill....
Nina said…
if you steam carrots, put a slice of apple in the boiling water. It takes the bitterness out of the carrots without making them sweet.
kenju said…
I would say shred the dill before you add it.

I made a soup yesterday that is mostly carrots, with potatoes, celery and onion. It calls for dill and it is a great soup, so I bet it would be good with your carrots.

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