Sweet Chipotle Carrots

Raw or fried, the carrot is a versatile beast. It forms the base of our vegetable stocks and complements many a Sunday lunch, boiled with peas or roasted with a glaze of delicious olive oil. Yes, the carrot forms a major part of our diet, and it's not going anywhere anytime soon.

I'd just bought some smokey chipotle chili powder at Borough Market and I had some carrots in desperate need of use. Faced with both the guilt of letting perfectly good vegetables go to waste and the desire to try out my new purchase, I combined the two in this oven roasted recipe.

One of the best ways to cook carrots, in my opinion, is rolled up in foil with a bunch of agave or brown sugar with a vegan butter substitute, and simply baked. Sweet and spicy similarly sounded like a good combination, one that would work well with the already sweet flavour carrots naturally provide, so I decided to go with an agave nectar based marinade.

I baked the carrots in a lattice for aesthetic reasons, but I'm not going to go into that here. The flavour is the same if you bung them in foil and the lattice is a pain in the arse (a pretty pain in the arse, but a pain nevertheless). If you do want to get fancy and you don't bake in foil, however, you'll need to reduce the cooking time (especially if you slice the carrots as thin as in the picture above).

The ingredients provided below are more of a suggestion than a recipe. I admittedly didn't measure, so if your oven goes into meltdown then... well, anyway.